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MEN AND STEEL 



BOOKS BY 
MARY HEATON VORSE 

The Prestons 

Growing Up 

The Ninth Man 



MEN AND STEEL 



BY 



MARY HEATON VORSE 




BONI AND 
PUBLISHERS 



LIVERIGHT 

NEW YORK 



'tin 

V^ -7, 



MEN AND STEEL 



Copyright, 1920, by 

BONI & LlVERIGHT, INC. 



Printed in the United States of America 



APR 13 1921 
g)C!,A614124 



CONTENTS 



PART I. STRIKE BACKGROUND 

CHAPTER PAGE" 

I. The Principality of Steel 11 

The Industry. Ore Mines. Coal, Coke and Carriers. 
Steel Corporation Profits. 

II. Steel Mills 18 

The Mills. Poured Iron and Steel. Open Hearth Fur- 
nace. Blooming Mill. Wire Mill. Skull Cracker. Wages 
and Hours. 

III. Men axd Machines 27 

Spring in the Steel Towns. Men Going to Work. Fray- 
car. The Mad Gunner. 

IV. Steel Towns 32 

Braddock. Slack. Flag of Hope. Pittsburgh, Youngs- 
town. New Steel Towns. 

V. Steel Masters and Labor 43 

Old Organizations. Freedom and Welfare. National 
Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers. 
Strike Demands. The President's Conference. Laughter 
of Europe. " What Meaneth a Tyrant." 

PART II. THE STEEL STRIKE 

VI. Strike and Strike Leaders 57 

Scope of Strike. W. Z. Foster. Some Organizers. 
VII. Violence 63 

Constabulary in Braddock. The Brutality oi Power. 
Foster's Office. Fanny Sellings. Third Degree. Rank 
and File. 

VlJLL Strike Meetings 73 

Meetings in Pittsburgh. Father Kazinci's Church. 
Meeting in Homestead. Marching Men. Youngstown 
Strikers. 

v 



vi Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

IX. Senators and Steel Workers 8£ 

The Senate Investigation. Bullied Workers. Outside 
Arrests. Docile Steel Workers. Amerieanizers. 

X. Outside People 91 

The Comfortable People. The Convention. Quiet 
Towns. 

PART III. SILENCE 

XI. Dark Towns 99 

Mother Jones. Steubenville. The Meeting in Mingo. 
Weirton. Pensions. Tamo Daleko. Johnstown. 

XII. Silence 110 

The Miner's Son. The Smothered Strike. What Every- 
one Knew. English Workers. Publicity Department. 
Letter from Alabama. Espionage. 

XIII. Commissary 120 

Pittsburgh Workers. The Strike Woman. Commissary 
in Braddock. Strike Relief Money. Meaning of Strikes. 

XIV. Anonymous People 130 

The Strike Baby. Old Country Children. Rosie's 
Measles. The Contented Woman. How They Came 
Here. 

PART IV. THE DYING STRIKE 

XV. The Break 141 

The Mills Are Pried Open. The Youngstown Office. 
Picket Line. Steel Workers' Children. Why Men Strike. 
Fighting Women. 

XVI. White Terror 152 

Johnstown Mobs. Youngstown Arrests. The Scab. 
Thanksgiving at Dinora. 

XVII. The Dying Strike 160 

The Funeral. The Federal Raids. The Last Days. The 
End. 

XVIII. Strike Derelicts 168 

Scrapped. The Riddle's Answer. Life -Long Protest. 
Old Strikers. Derelicts. 

XIX. Aliens 176 

Boy Without a Country. Strikers' Christmas A Work- 
er's Story. They Want to Go Home. They Will Wait. 



PART ONE 
STRIKE BACKGROUND 



MEN AND STEEL 



CHAPTER I 



THE PRINCIPALITY OF STEEL 



PRINCIPALITIES in America do not exist as geo- 
graphical areas. In America principalities exist by 
industries. 
The principality of Steel is young. It has the despotism 
and the power of youth; its power rests only on wealth 
and dominion. Power without responsibility. Power 
which throttles among its subjects all efforts at self- 
government. Power brutal, young, riotous, lusty, driven 
by the force of steam. Power which treats men's lives as 
commodities. A creative thing made of fire and iron and 
taking no account of the lives of men. Smoke, fire, iron 
and human lives are its substance. Gain and greed and 
the sullen discontent of men are the stuff from which 
this unthinking despotism is made. 

The men who have iron prevail. The iron masters have 
always had power. The smiths have always been the 
aristocrats of the artisans. America of the Indians might 
yet dispute the civilization of Europe, as does North 

11 



12 Men and Steel 

Africa, had the Indians had iron. Iron and Steel began 
the life of moderns. Iron and Steel still rule. 

No industry is as imposing as Steel, no industry so 
knocks at the door of the imagination. There must have 
been a time when that piece of molten metal made from a 
stone seemed magic; it still is so. 

The magic has grown. 

The might of Steel has increased. 

This industry has progressed mightily. There is no 
prouder achievement in American industry than Steel. 
In manufacture of Steel we surpass the world. Sheffield 
is an old man in his dotage. Newcastle sleeps. Pittsburgh 
is To-day making To-morrow. 

The steel towns make all the raw stuff of life as we 
know it. Here are our great forges. Here is the core of 
our civilization. They make steel cars in Lyndora. They 
make rails in Monessen. In all the world there are no 
such tubing works as in Youngstown and McKeesport. 

In the steel towns they make the raw material for all the 
swift moving things; the wheels of great machines, the 
engines which move trains and vessels and airships, the 
frame- work of high buildings. Our civilization is forged 
in the steel towns. 

A rampart of mills lines the river bottoms near all steel 
towns. These mills stretch in a mighty frieze miles long. 
The men who go in mornings and come out nights, who go 
in nights and come out mornings, seem like processions 
of ants. 

Smoke belches perpetually from the black mill chimneys, 



The Principality of Steel 13 

which rise like the pipes of black organs, three chimneys, 
five chimneys, seven chimneys in a row. Chimney and fur- 
nace follow one another along the rivers. 

The fires of these mills burn night and day. Night and 
day steel is made by the men who live huddled around the 
flanks of the mills. 

Through the work of these men Pittsburgh grew strong 
and built high towers. Town after town made steel; one 
mill bred another. Youngstown, Johnstown, Wheeling, 
Steubenville made steel and iron, or things that were made 
from steel and iron. 

Steel grew powerful and great. Steel blackened the 
skies of South Chicago; Steel built Gary and the towns in 
Calumet Basin. Steel was made in Joliet; Allentown grew 
rich on Steel, and Steel was made in Colorado and 
Alabama. 

A great industry flung itself across a continent. 
Through the ceaseless energy of the steel masters and 
through the unfailing faithfulness of the men who went 
to the mills every morning and every night, a principality 
was built. 

If these men stopped working our civilization would 
stop. Between them coal and iron hold America in their 
hands. Coal and iron and steel rule our civilization and 
are its masters. 



14 Men and Steel 

Ore Mines 

They make steel from piles of red dust — the crushed 
ore. These are the places where the iron-ore comes from: 

Marquette 

Menominee 

Gogebic 

Vermilion 

Mesaba 

It is like a song. Much of the ore from which they 
make fine steel comes from Mesaba. The Mesaba range 
is a crescent of towns and mines flung over sixty miles of 
pit-scarred country, open pits yawning, open pits half a 
mile across, red as dried blood, pits so deep that the en- 
gines crawling up their flanks look like beetles. Pits the 
color of burnt umber, streaked with rust, streaked with 
yellow. Around the pits forest fires have left the charred 
stumps of great trees. Among the burnt stumps are 
bowlders strewn there by glaciers. There are nine beau- 
tiful towns and fifty bleak "locations" squatting about the 
flanks of the mines. 

When I was on the Mesaba Range there was a strike. 
At that time I saw drunken gunmen wearing the stars 
of deputy sheriffs guarding company property. These 
were on Indian Reservation where no drink is allowed. 

There were no houses in this location, only cabins made 
from logs and the sides of square oil cans. There were 



■ 



The Principality of Steel 15 

no streets in this town. The cabins were placed hap- 
hazard among stumps and bowlders. The company owned 
the single pump. The company owned the land under 
the cabins. Refuse lay where it fell, and hogs rooted in it. 
But the women who stood at the doorways were wide- 
bosomed and clean. Their curtains in the windows were 
clean and they grew flowers from tin cans. I saw one 
cabin which had a piece of stained glass above the door. 

Past the cabins went the drunken gunmen; one held him- 
self up on the arm of the other and shouted: 

"I don't know if I'm coming or going. I don't know 
if it's night or morning/' 

They saw me and cursed at me foully. On this location 
two Italians had been sentenced to a year's imprisonment 
for bringing red wine here to drink at table. 



16 Men and Steel 

Coal, Coke and Carriers 

From the Mesaba mines railways take the ore to Duluthu 
Long, ungainly ore boats ferry it across the lakes. These 
rails and these boats are owned and controlled by the iron 
masters. 

They are digging coal to smelt this ore in Pennsylvania. 
As you go through the country you cannot forget coal, 
you cannot forget that underneath the earth men work 
night and day. 

In Connelsville the coke ovens burn with red licking 
fires to make coke for the blast. They burn night 
and day. 

At night the river runs red where it passes Connelsville. 

The steel masters own and control the iron mines. The 
coal and coke to smelt the ore they own and control. 

All these things — the mines, the railways and the boats 
— belong to those who own the ramparts of the mills. 
They also own the men who work in the mills. But if the 
men mining coal and making steel stopped, then life as 
we know it would cease. 



The Principality of Steel 17 

Profits 

About one half of the steel industry is owned by the 
U. S. Steel Corporation. These are the figures of the 
Corporation's surplus: / 

1913 Total undivided surplus $151,798,428.89 

1914 Total undivided surplus 135,204,471.90 

1915 Total undivided surplus 180,025,328.74 

1916 Total undivided surplus 381,360,913.37 

1917 Total undivided surplus 431,660,803.63 

1918 Total undivided surplus 466,888,421.38 

1919 Total undivided surplus 493,048,201.93 

Compared with the wage budgets in 191 8, the Corpora- 
tion's final surplus after paying dividends of $96,382,027 
and setting aside $174,277^835 for Federal taxes payable 
in 1919:? was $466,888,421 — a sum large enough to have 
paid a second time the total wage and salary budget for 
1918 ($452,663,524), and to have left a surplus of over 
$14,000,000. In 1919 the undivided surplus was $493,- 
048,201.93, or $13,000,000 more than the total wage and 
salary expenditures.* 

* Interchurch Report of Steel Strike. 



CHAPTER II 



STEEL MILLS 



IN the steel towns the mills are surrounded by high 
walls. The gates are guarded by uniformed guards* 
You must have a permit to go in. A man may live 
years in steel towns and see no more of the mills than 
smoke and steam. 

The yards of the steel mills are surrounded by tracks. 
Engines puff up and down through the twenty-four hours. 
Mountains of ore, mountains of coke, trains unloading, 
scrap engines unloading ore and coke, trains carrying off 
steel bars. Magnets everywhere are loading and unload- 
ing steel ingots into cars. Men moving in unhurried fash- 
ion. No one moves rapidly ; every one has time. There is 
a never-ending quality to all this. 

The size, the leisure, the intensity of the fires and the 
furnaces give the illusion of ritual. Rooms as high as the 
apse of a cathedral, with a core of molten-metal furnace, 
poured steel, red hot steel bars. Through the gloom 
shafts of blue light from outside, shafts of sunlight solid 
as searchlights, while little unhurried men, small men 
whose presence is scarcely observed, are standing on plat- 
forms pulling levers. 

18 



Steel Mills 19 

Three things impress you when you go into the mills: 
the size, the absence of men, the absence of haste. Here 
a tremendous work is in progress. Here is being manu- 
factured the steel skeleton of our monstrous civilization. 
Here before your eyes you may see it being made from 
fire and iron with the help of great machines. That is 
what you think first. 

Later you say, "Oh, men are helping too !" This is an 
after-thought. 



20 Men and Steel 

Poured Iron and Steel 

There is no glory comparable to poured iron or poured 
steel. The gushing out of fiery metal from a great wheel- 
like container seems like the beginning of Creation. This 
black container of molten iron is twenty feet high. A 
ladle advances on an overhead railway. It travels to the 
container of molten iron. It moves forward on its track 
and then laterally and then down. The black container 
swings around slowly on its axle as a man presses a lever. 

Then follows the sudden magnificence of poured metal. 
Like giant fireworks, a thousand sparks fly from it, a 
river of white fire throwing off cascades of stars, a fiery 
shower on all sides. On a greasy platform above the ladle 
are the men who operate it. They look down with indiffer- 
ence into its seething deadly brightness. 

My guide said: "A man fell into that once, and they 
buried him and all the tons of metal. Right here they 
held the burial service." 

The story of the man who fell into the vat of molten 
metal and became part of it obsesses the men's minds. I 
have heard it told in different ways. 

They tell you of a man made into iron rails, of another 
who went into the structure of great buildings. 

This story is as old as time. There was a great bell 
once which was cast and re-cast and would not ring true 
until a human being was sacrificed to it. 



Steel Mills 21 

Open-Hearth Furnace 

Very slowly, with caution as though afraid of spilling 
its contents, the ladle moves on its track, away from the 
container. It moves laterally to the open-hearth furnace. 
A gigantic hook descends from above as though of its own 
intelligence. It hooks itself under the rim of the ladle; 
the door of the furnace lifts up. You look in into the intol- 
erable white glare. The red flames seem dark. The red 
flames seem to be the brothers of smoke, beside the white 
incandescence of the molten mass that will become steel. 

I would rather see steel poured than hear a great orches- 
tra. The furious hallelujah of the blast furnace gives you 
the impression of sound. 

When you stare at the glory of the open furnace and 
see the molten metal giving forth its shower of sparks, 
you are witnessing creation. Worlds have been made 
with the intolerable glory of fire. In this fashion, too, our 
modern world has been created. 

The ladle of iron pours crackling into the open-hearth 
furnace. Before the furnace are mounds of manganese 
and of other metals of which the steel is made. I asked 
an old Welsh steel worker: "What is in steel?" 

He stamped his foot on the earth. "Everything in that 
is steel," he said. "There is naught you wouldn't find in 
steel." It seemed to him that it was a cosmic creation. 

Force is confined in these furnaces; from one moment to 
another it may escape its bounds, from one moment to 
another fire may cease to be docile to men's wills, fire will 



22 Men and Steel 

destroy instead of create. It does destroy. Steel falls 
where there is water and explodes. Furnaces explode. 
The steel towns are full of tales of disaster, and as though 
in warning, the men's clothes are speckled with burns from 
glancing sparks of poured metal. You are forever con- 
scious that this force working for man is trying to escape. 
In many steel mills all that human ingenuity can 
do to prevent disaster has been done. There are two facts 
against which no safety device can guard: fire burns, and 
men forget. 



Steel Mills 23 

Blooming Mill 

The red ingots weighing a ton are carried deliberately 
on the moving track, from soaking pit to blooming mill. 
The mill is lofty and dark and the fiery metal is like a 
red eye. The red-eyed ingot, the green spitting fire of the 
lever, are the only light things in the twilight. Blue light 
from an opening in the roof pours down solid like a cur- 
tain and shuts off the vista of the mill. 

The man on the platform pushes a lever; the hot steel 
bar is hurled forward and crashes beneath the roller. 
Bristling iron tongues, like iron fingers, turn it over. The 
man pushes the lever and unchains the force that carries 
the steel bar back. It seems like a tortured thing. There 
is anguish in the force that compresses the great bar of 
glowing steel. Again it is dashed forward and again the 
steel fingers turn it over. The force here unchained is so 
great that it holds an element of terror. 

The roar of the blooming mill and of the rolling mill, 
the hum of machinery, the crackling and spitting of the 
electric levers never stop. So constant is the noise that 
it gives the effect of quiet. 

Poured iron, open-hearth furnace, poured steel, soaking 
pit, blooming mill, rolling mill, gray steel still smoking 
hot, bars of steel piled ready for use — this is the sequence 
of the mill which goes on night and day like some process 
of nature. It seems too inevitable to be man's invention. 
The little slow men seem the servants of the great forces 
of fire and iron. 



24 Men and Steel 

Wire Mill 

Wire is lengthened by running rapidly in long loops over 
pegs. It forms streaks of fire that seem to move of their 
own volition — fiery snakes, writhing and leaping, running 
on endlessly forever. They daze you as they rush before 
you. It does not seem possible that these things are not 
alive. 

Behind is the gloomy mill, in front brilliant moving wire. 
Slow moving laborers pass with loaded barrows; they seem 
hypnotized by monotony, by the leaping red serpents. 
Without stopping, this thin line of fire runs on night and 
day; night and day men tend them in their courses. This 
thin, long line of writhing red fire is one of the most beau- 
tiful things in the world — a leaping ribbon of flame, yard 
on yard of it, looping and twisting. This happy, leaping, 
running, twisting, flame-colored wire makes iron fences 
when it is cold. 



Steel Mills 25 

The Skull Cracker 

Behind the walls of the same steel mill are the skull- 
cracker and the wire mill. 

I found the skull-cracker by chance down the end of a 
muddy lane one spring day. It was at the very end of the 
mill. A narrow railway track runs to it and brings pieces 
of steel refuse to be cracked over and fed back into the 
furnaces. 

These great fragments of gray steel look old as time; 
they look like pieces of extinct worlds. They look as 
though they must have been fused in the heart of some 
long extinct volcano. It does not seem possible that they 
were made only yesterday in the furnaces above. They 
are unloaded from the car, which brings them by a huge 
circular magnet. The magnet reaches over and touches 
the fragment of gray metal and places it where it wishes. 
The current is turned on again and the magnet touches a 
sphere of steel weighing five tons, and draws it up forty 
feet in the air; the current is turned off and the steel 
sphere falls upon the fragment below and cracks it. 

It looks like some strange game — the magnet picking up 
the gray ball, dropping it and then picking it up, and load- 
ing and unloading the steel. 

The skull-cracker is in a little yard by itself, out of 
doors. There are three men in the crew. The craneman 
pulls the levers which work the great crane to which the 
magnet is attached, the laborer does what manual work 
there is, and the foreman looks on. 



26 Men and Steel 

Wages and Hours 

The United States Steel Corporation's policy as regards 
labor dominates the steel industry. 

There are, roughly speaking, 500,000 steel workers in 
the United States. 

191,000 employees work in U. S. Steel Corporation's 
manufacturing plants. 

32% do not make enough pay to come to the level set 
by Government experts as minimum subsistence standard 
for family of five. 

72% of all steel workers are below the level set by 
Government experts as minimum of comfort level set for 
families of five. That means that three-quarters of the 
steel workers cannot earn enough for an American stand- 
ard of living. 

50% of the U. S. Steel Corporation's employees work 
12 hours a day. -50% of these work 7 days a week. 

Steel workers work from 20 to 40 hours longer a week 
than other basic industries near steel communities. 

American steel workers work over 20 hours a week 
longer than British steel workers.* 

*Interchurch Report of Steel Strike. 



CHAPTER III 

MEN AND MACHINES 

Spring in a Steel Town 

FROM the skull-cracker and out of the mill I walked 
through muddy unpaved lanes, past unlovely lit- 
tered yards of workers' houses. Only the foreman 
of the skull-cracker had made a small garden behind the 
mill gate. One young Slovak was digging to plant things 
in front of his frame cottage. 

The mills of this town were on the flat river bottom. 
The old river banks mount steeply. The yards of the 
rickety frame houses slope sharply down. Melting snow 
had uncovered the refuse of winter. In the air was the 
sickly sweet smell of rotting garbage. The steep yards 
were surrounded by ramshackle fences. At the bottom 
near the street heavier things had slipped down hill — 
discarded bed springs, coal scuttles with holes in them, 
rusty pots and pans, old corsets, shoes, and more tin 
cans. In these towns on the Monongahela refuse and 
garbage are not taken away. For months it rots where it 
lies. Spring finds it there. 

In my country there is a dreary spot which we call the 

27 



28 Men and Steel 

town dump. Here it seems that the children of Lazarus 
have been keeping house. 

There are disabled cook-stoves, old beds leaking their 
entrails, ruined cook pots, ruined scuttles, ruined buckets. 
Old hats, old corsets and old shoes. Little boys with 
wheel-barrows come and throw away things down the dump 
which is over the steep side of a dune. 

Spring uncovers thousands of such places in the steel 
towns. 

Order for the machines ; disorder for the men who 
tend them. Man's affairs are dwarfed outside the mills as 
men are dwarfed in the mills. 

On one hillside was a single irregular patch of green. 
Some hopeful soul beside the foreman of the skull-cracker 
had planted a garden in the midst of the tin cans and 
refuse. There was the only sign of spring in that town. 



Men and Machines 29 

Men Going to Work 

The steel workers were streaming from the mills. Night 
and morning the streets of all steel towns are black with 
steel workers swarming up from the river bottom, stream- 
ing down the hillsides. They come on trolleys — special 
cars bring the steel workers. The men going to work 
walk with their heads down. They lurch as if heavy 
with sleep. They walk fast; they don't talk; they look 
neither to the right nor to the left, but with heads down 
they plunge forward as though the mill gates sucked 
them in. 

They meet the shift coming off. The men are worn with 
fatigue and their eyes are hollow, but they chat together. 
They are going home to food and to bed. 

Men coming, men going. Day shift, night shift. Ten 
hours light, fourteen night. This procession is punctual 
as the tide. It never stops. It goes in every morning, it 
comes out every night. Like the sun, like the tides, it 
knows neither holiday nor Sunday. 

It does not seem as if men owned the mills. It seems as 
if the mills owned the men. The mill gates open up in the 
morning and suck the men in and at night they open up 
again and spew them out. As you go through towns this 
idea becomes an obsession. 



30 Men and Steel 

Fraycar 

There was a man named Fraycar who, when he was 
drunk, would come down before the mill gates and would 
curse the mills; he would curse slag and slack; he would 
curse the mill bosses and the men who worked; he would 
curse the pouring steel and the fires, and the smoke that 
poured out of the mills and blackened the sky. His 
friends would follow him and watch him fearfully as he 
stood, huge, before the mill gates, cursing. He would cry 
out to the silent wall: 

"I am stronger than you." 

As he drank in the saloon a fury would overtake him 
and he would begin to talk of the mill, and then he would 
rush out, and behind him there would be silence, no one 
would laugh. He would curse the mills and furnaces; he 
would curse the machines; he cursed slag and slack. 
When he was drunk he thought the machines were alive, 
he thought they owned him and that he was their slave. 



Men and Machines 31 

The Mad Gunner 

You will find repeated again and again the illusion that 
the machines have a life of their own. 

In France I heard a variation of Fraycar's story. 
There was a wounded man whose head had been hit by 
shrapnel. He had been a gunner of one of the great guns. 
He thought that he had a tremendous secret and he would 
stop his nurse and the visitors and the doctor because he 
feared that he might die and with him his secret would 
perish. The secret was this : 

It was that the machines, in revenge for the work 
that we made them do, were killing men. He thought that 
machines were alive and that they were malevolently dis- 
posed to men. 

"Stop making machines/' he would cry, "and you will 
stop war." 

He believed that the great gun had not been obedient to 
him, but that he and the other men of the gun crew obeyed 
the great gun and did its bidding. 



CHAPTER IV 

STEEL TOWNS 

BraddocJc 

CIVILIZATIONS write their history in terms of 
buildings. Towns name their aspirations and tes- 
tify to their failures in brick and mortar. In the 
slums of cities civilization writes with stones and wood the 
story of its defeat. Each generation through its palaces 
names its ruler and its deity. Our noblest temples are built 
in the service of transportation, and the towers of indus- 
try laugh at the church spires. 

Streets and the houses on them cannot lie, nor do the 
crowds which walk down them tell anything but truth. 

For nearly half a century Coal and Steel have owned 
great districts of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois. 
For nearly half a century Steel has been writing its own 
history in the houses and factories of its towns. 

Braddock is one of the oldest steel towns. Here Car- 
negie Steel was born. Its mills existed before the great 
mills of Homestead. A ganglion of towns — Braddock, 
Rankin, Homestead, Bessemer, lined the Monongahela 
River with steel mills. 

All of Braddock is black. The soot of the mills has 

32 



Steel Towns 33 

covered it. There is no spot in Braddock that is fair 
to see. It has neither park nor playground. It is a 
town of slack disorder and of scant self-respect. Those 
who have made money in Braddock mills live where they 
cannot see Braddock. The steel workers who can, escape 
up the hillsides. They go to North Braddock or to Wolf- 
town; but many and many of them live and die in the 
First Ward. 

They live some in two-story brick houses, some in black- 
ened frame dwellings. One set of houses faces the street, 
the other the court. The courts are bricked and littered 
with piles of cans, piles of rubbish, bins of garbage, hil- 
locks of refuse — refuse and litter, litter and refuse. 
Playing in the refuse and ashes and litter — children. The 
decencies of life ebb away as one nears the mills. I passed 
one day along an alley which fronted on an empty lot. 
Here the filth and refuse of years had been churned into 
viscous mud. A lean dog was digging. Pale children 
paddled in the squashy filth and made playthings of an- 
cient rubbish. Beyond was the railroad tracks, beyond 
that the mills. Two-storied brick houses flanked the brick 
street. No green thing grew anywhere. 

But in the brick courtyard Croatian and Slovak women 
were weaving rugs. In their villages in Europe they had 
woven the clothes of their men. In Braddock's squalid 
courtyards they weave bright colored rugs and sing as they 
weave. Here and there men bring tables out of doors and 
play cards. They nod to me in village fashion as I pass. 
Everywhere were children — Slovak children with flaxen 



34 Men and Steel 

hair and blue eyed; wide- faced Magyar children, Gypsy 
children. Then I knew that the chief product of Braddock 
and its sister towns was not steel. 

Their principal product is children. 

Generation after generation of children, born where no 
green thing grows. Hundreds and thousands of children 
playing in the refuse of forsaken brick courtyards or 
along the streets. Generations of children reared under 
the somber magnificence of the clouds of smoke which 
blanket the sky and obscure the sun. 

I learned in Braddock what condemns men to live in 
these tenements on the river bottom where the slack from 
the mills rains on them. 

What condemns them to live here is their children. The 
more children the less the chance of escape. Here in 
these Braddock houses live the people of eternally unful- 
filled dreams, here live those whose hopes forever are 
betrayed by the unforeseen, the people without a margin. 

I know two men, Milko and Pasterik. They came to 
this country together, a generation ago. Pasterik has 
escaped to Wolftown and owns a square box of a house. 
From his windows he can see the yellow water of the 
Monongahela. Milko lives among the condemned in the 
courtyard off Willow Way. He explained this to me. 

"Missus," he said, "my friend Pasterik get ten chil- 
dren. I get eleven. Four of his children die by diphtheria 
all together. He can go — he can buy house. My children, 
they all live." 



Steel Towns 35 

Slack 

Slack covers everything. It sifts in everywhere. Slack 
is what doesn't melt in the mountains of red ore — a metal 
particle, powdered ore, powdered metal. It silts down 
all growing things. You can see the tiny bits of ore 
gleaming on your hands. The shining ore dusts your coat. 
It gets in your hair. 

On certain days they blow the slack out. Mighty cur- 
rents of air blow the choking slack out of the costly mill 
chimneys onto the cheap human life outside. Those days 
the sun is darkened, and the steel workers returning home 
hide their faces as from a sand storm. They duck along, 
jackets over heads, under the fury of the falling slack. 
You find it everywhere. It lodges in the creases of your 
clothes. Your hands are never clean. Nothing, between 
soot and slack, can be clean long in the steel towns. 

I have a friend who lives six miles from Braddock. 
Every night she sweeps off her piazza; every morning you 
walk across it you leave footprints in the slack fallen 
during the night. 

The smoke is not merely a stupendous background for 
the flaming mills. It means work for anonymous women 
in thousands of ramshackle homes, hard work, never ceas- 
ing work. The men come home with oil-drenched clothes 
for the women to wash, the soot and slack drift into the 
houses, night and day, for the women to scrub. 



36 Men and Steel 

The Flag of Defiance 

The women in the steel towns fly a flag of defiance 
against the dirt. It is their white window curtains. You 
cannot go into any foul courtyard without finding white 
lace curtains stretched to dry on frames. Wherever you go, 
in Braddock or in Homestead or in filthy Rankin, you will 
find courageous women hopefully washing their white cur- 
tains. There is no woman so driven with work that she will 
not attempt this decency. 

It is the way these women have of reassuring themselves 
against the drifting soot and the slack sifting in by night 
and by day. It is their way of saying, "I love cleanliness 
and beauty." One could write a tragedy about these win- 
dow curtains. They have become to these women a fixed 
idea. They wash their sash curtains every week, and this 
in towns where the water must be carried in buckets from 
courtyards. 

I saw only one house where the curtains were filthy in 
the steel towns. It was a signal of defeat, a flag at half 
mast. It was in the house of a young woman whose 
oval face had a yellow pallor. She had a very young baby, 
and at its birth she had blood poisoning. Now she was 
barely able to do the most necessary (things for her 
children and her husband. The room was in disorder. The 
glowing spirit that marks so many of the Slovak homes 
did not exist. Life pressed her too hard. She was swim- 
ming against a tide too strong for her. As a signal of her 
defeat, even the curtains were dirty. 



Steel Towns 37 

I learned this winter the difference between two rooms 
and four. Two rooms means no privacy for any one. Four 
rooms means decency and a home. I learned that a house 
without running water means slavery for the woman living 
in it. This winter in Braddock and in the steel towns in 
Alleghany County I saw women washing clothes in icy 
courtyards. I saw old women carrying buckets of water 
from pumps. I have seen courtyards where lived thirty- 
four families; they had but two faucets of water in the 
court. I saw young mothers walk out in the snow for water. 
I have seen them bent over from carrying buckets of water. 
There were many families where the woman washed the 
clothes of her boarders, as well as those of her family. 

These women spend their lives in an effort to keep clean. 
It is unavailing; it is hard for any one — soot and slack 
fall night and day and never stop; there is a fine scum 
of blackness over everything. I have heard people say: 

"Why do they live crowded in such places? Why do 
the steel workers live in the filthy courtyards without run- 
ning water, without conveniences? W r hy don't they move?" 
I heard a woman ask a priest this. 

"Where can they move to?" he asked. "If a man is 
working in the Edgar Thompson works, he must live in 
Braddock; if he is working for the Carnegie Steel Com- 
pany in Homestead, he must live in Homestead. If you 
look around and try to hire a better place, you will find 
there is none. They cannot move unless they buy." 



38 Men and Steel 

Pittsburg 

Pittsburg is shaped like the prow of a vessel. At the 
point where the Monongahela and the Allegheny Rivers 
flow together it seems to be cleaving up stream in their 
embrace. 

It is as though the business of Pittsburg were on an 
island. As you come down the river Pittsburg presents 
a sky line which recalls New York; its high towers, com- 
memorating the steel industries, search the skies. There 
is a tingle of life in the air; it is one of the spots on the 
earth which bubbles and boils and stews with vitality. 
Something here is being created. You cannot forget by day 
or by night that Pittsburg makes steel. By day a cloud 
of smoke tells you this, and the fiery rivers by night. 

As you look you may read in Pittsburg's streets and 
Pittsburg's rivers the history of this part of the country. 

There was here first a trading post since it was a meet- 
ing place of rivers; traders came from the north and met 
those who came up from the Mississippi River. 

The Pennsylvania Dutch made a comfortable city on 
the site of the French traders. Then came steel and built 
a clamorous city. 

Pittsburg is built up sheer hills. If people tell you Pitts- 
burg is not beautiful do not believe them. It is beautiful 
in a new way. Its rivers at night run greasy like molten 
metal in whirlpools of fire — whorls and spirals of fire from 
the plant furnaces shatter the night of Pittsburg skies. 



Steel Towns 39 

All around Pittsburg are parks where the people live 
who make the money from industry. 

The people who make the steel live crowded on the south 
side — they live , in homes clinging to hillsides. You see 
their shanties in the bottom of sudden gulches. 

Youngstown 

Youngstown is a yawning pit where they make steel, 
surrounded by houses. The Youngstown steel works join 
those of East Youngstown. You may ride for miles on 
the trolley and all the while you will look down on the 
tubing works. The might of steel is more visible in 
Youngstown than anywhere else. Beside Youngstown the 
works in Braddock, the steel works in Pittsburg, the great 
Homestead works are but a beginning: these were the 
seeds; Youngstown is the fulfillment. This river of steel 
works runs from the works of Girard, across to Steelton 
and marches up to East Youngstown miles away, a mighty 
procession of chimney and blast furnaces. 

In Youngstown one can look down on the steel yards 
and realize their extent. They are so large that they 
match the open pit mines whose size dwarfs men to ants 
and engines to crawling beetles. You stand on the hillside 
and watch the ceaseless activity. All day the yard engines 
puff back and forth; all day the rows of chimneys belch 
flame. By night Youngstown's sky is incandescent with 
the magnificence of the never-ending blasts; by night it 
looks as though the end of the world were at hand. 



40 Men and Steel 

Youngstown's main streets are full of shops. A river 
of people flows down these streets perpetually. They 
eome from Central Europe; they come from Russia; the 
Baltic and the Balkan states meet on Youngstown streets, 
and go shopping together. By night they drift down the 
street seeking pleasure. The people have not elbow room; 
they swarm over one another. Saturday afternoon there 
is an air of holiday abroad. The town vibrates with a 
vitality that does not know where to spend itself. 

Up on the hillside are long streets filled with the homes 
of the rich people. The steel workers talk about these 
people; the steel workers tell you fantastic stories about 
the lives of the rich men of their town; they tell you these 
stories with disapproval. In the last twenty years steel 
millionaires made money quickly in Youngstown, and they 
made a great deal, and some of the men who made these 
fortunes bit into life like greedy children; the workers 
think that all of them have done that, for among them you 
hear only fantastic tales of the men whose policies shape 
the workers' destinies. 

In East Youngstown life is scraped down to the bone: 
there are the mills, there are the workers — and formerly 
there were the saloons. There is nothing else. Here are 
no fine houses, only the steel workers' dwellings. Most of 
them are ugly frame buildings, climbing muddy streets. 

In East Youngstown you realize that men are here not 
to live but to tend the mills. Humanity is dwarfed; the 
machines which make the industry are exalted. In East 
Youngstown is nothing but steel; there is a pillar of cloud 



Steel Towns 41 

by day and there is a saffron glare in the sky by night 
that forever reminds you of this. 

East Youngstown has a special flavor of its own. There 
is a hope here that there is not in Braddock. The crowds 
that swarm the main streets and fill the moving picture 
shows are young and lusty. 

But the races that mingle on Youngstown streets, who 
drank together in the saloons, who play together in the 
poolrooms, who fill the moving picture theaters, and who 
shop together in Youngstown' s shops, make something else 
beside steel. 

They are talking over many things together. They do 
not know what they want — they do not want what they 
have. This talk goes on all the time; it goes on as per- 
petually and inevitably as does the making of steel; it 
keeps time with the rolling smoke by day and with the 
fury of the fiery sky by night. 

In 1916 the discontent welled over. From one day to 
another Youngstown was on strike. No one knew why; 
there were no leaders. From one day to another men quit 
work and streamed down the streets. The mills stopped. 
There was rioting. Strikers were killed. Houses were 
burned. The strike flared up like a furnace blast. Like 
the fire of the blast furnace their discontent has never 
gone out. 



42 Men and Steel 

The New Towns 

There is a part of Youngstown called Steelton, near the 
Ohio Works. During the war houses were built here that 
looked as though fitted for human habitation. In Steelton' 
you may see nice houses with five and six rooms, houses of 
concrete, neat frame houses with gas burners in the 
kitchens. There is space for a garden. 

There is a distance of generations between Steelton and 
Braddock. Wherever you go you can tell the age of a 
steel town by the quality of houses. 

In the town of Gary, Indiana, the steel masters spoke 
their minds in terms of the twentieth century. In Gary 
there are school systems the world knows about; there are 
playgrounds and there are baseball fields. 

But, there is one thing in common in all these towns. 
Meritorious East Pittsburg, Steelton with its comparative 
decencies, bleak Lyndora, Rankin stewing over the mills, 
Braddock, and Homestead of the foul courtyards, Gary 
and Youngstown — have all one overwhelming motive: Man 
is puny; Industry great. 



CHAPTER V 

STEEL AND LABOR 

Old Organizations 

IN every community there is some dominant thought. 
If you look for it, there is some moral value expressed 
in the structure of the houses and in the plan of the 
town. 

A roaring oil town, a new mining camp, spill out thei* 
naive stories of greed and adventure. 

I have seen Pennsylvania Dutch towns which proclaimed 
in every brick, standards of comfortable decency. You 
may read New Bedford's history in one street. Portuguese 
negroes from the Western Islands live in the beautiful 
dilapidated houses of dead sea captains — they work in 
the mills. 

The atmosphere around Pittsburg towns is one of arro- 
gant indifference to human beings. There is here, too, an 
atmosphere of repression. A generation ago the steel 
masters said "hush" to the workers, and they were obeyed. 

When steel began to grow along the rivers the men 
organized. There was a time when Labor had a say 
in the steel industry. In very early times the puddlers 
spoke for their rights. In the fifties they organized into 

43 



44 Men and Steel 

the Sons of Vulcan. This was a proud organization; its 
men were fighters. Other organizations arose in the steel 
industry, which all combined later in the Amalgamated 
Association of Iron and Steel and Tin Workers. The men 
in this organization held their heads up and took off their 
hats to no one; they were arrogant men, and their exist- 
ence was a thorn in the side of the iron masters, who, in 
those days, bargained with them. 

Steel then grew great. The United States Steel Cor- 
poration merged steel into a principality. To-day there 
are 191^000 steel workers who draw pay checks from this 
one great company. When the steel masters organized 
themselves, they decided to crush their workers' 
organization. 

Up to 1892 there were shifting conflicts. The steel mas- 
ters fought organized labor in two ways. They used the 
weapon of the lockout, and they used the weapon of 
espionage. Espionage grew powerful throughout the mills. 
No one could tell where Judas sat. The air was poisoned 
by the presence of spies. It is still poisoned. 

In the Homestead strike of 1892, another weapon was 
used. The steel companies used armed detectives. Many 
strikers were shot to death. They routed the strikers 
and, by 1896, all unionism in the steel mills was crushed 
for a generation. For a generation spies watched the 
workers and union men were told to go. 

This was called the "open shop system" and the "free 
right of individual contract." 



Steel and Labor 45 

So the government of the steel industry grew more auto- 
cratic than that of an absolute monarchy. 

Two rights existed to the peoples of despotic countries 
of all times. One was the right of petition. If the people 
had something they wished their king to know they could 
tell him. Their petition was read by him and he replied 
to it. 

The United States Steel Corporation is more autocratic. 
It denies the men who work for it the right of petition — 
for principle's sake. 

The people in autocratic monarchies had another right 
which custom gave them. This was the right of demonstra- 
tion. They could voice their grievances to their rulers 
by this means. 

They may not do this in the steel country — the employ- 
er's principles are against this. 

The United States Steel Corporation will not commun- 
icate with the representatives of men whom it employs. 
It will not discuss with them those things which make up 
the fabric of their lives. It will not bargain with labor. 

The United States Government meets the representatives 
of labor. The United States Steel Corporation will not. 



46 Men and Steel 

Freedom and Welfare 

For a long time men and ore were on one footing; both 
were commodities; there was plenty of both. When men 
died of burns, when men were crushed in the mills, there 
were others to fill their places. When discontent drove 
men on, men were waiting for their jobs. Those were 
the days that built such towns as Rankin and Braddock, 
as Homestead and McKeesport. Those were the old days 
when the power of steel used men as it used the ore. In 
those days science dealt only with the ore and the pro- 
cesses of turning ore into iron and steel. The scientific 
spirit had not yet touched the men. Twenty years ago 
life was cheap in the steel towns. 

Science showed the need of a stable supply of labor; 
it demonstrated how much new men cost; the shifting and 
ebbing of labor was found to be expensive; a discontented, 
disaffected labor supply did not produce. The heads of 
great industries began to perceive that there was some- 
thing wrong. The steel masters led the way in welfare 
work. 

The United States Steel Corporation has spent millions 
of dollars on welfare. It spent ten million dollars in 
1917 and seventeen million in 1918- It provided schools 
and churches and clubs. In the Senate investigations of 
the steel strike Gary proudly gave the number of clothes 
lockers, water closet bowls, sanitary drinking fountains, 
swimming pools and restaurants provided for the men. 

In 191 8 the United States Steel Corporation spent a 



Steel and Labor 47 

million dollars on accident prevention. In six years the 
fatalities were cut down nearly fifty per cent by safety 
devices. The steel companies, formerly prodigal of human 
life, had become paternal. 

The Autocracy of Steel had become benevolent and 
paternalistic. It rewarded loyal subjects — but it punished 
disloyal ones with banishment in times of peace, and in 
times of revolt it used armed force. 

The Autocracy of Coal in West Virginia makes war 
openly on the workers. The Autocracy of Steel makes 
open war only in time of strike. It would rather be kind 
— if the workers would be good. 

It was too late. Another day had dawned. It was too 
late to placate the workers with bands or even with pen- 
sions. There was something new in the air. Men had 
new thoughts and new desires. They were ready to 
express them in other ways than by an upheaving surge 
of inarticulate discontent. There was a great stirring 
among the people. Not even the safety devices could stop 
it. No amount of welfare work could prevent the workers 
in the steel mills from hearing the great voices talking 
throughout the earth. 



48 Men and Steel 

The National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel 

Workers 

In 191 8 the American Federation of Labor voted to 
organize the workers. The agreement between the work- 
ers and employers of the War Labor Board still existed. 
On one hand the workers had agreed not to strike; on the 
other the employers had agreed not to interfere with the 
organization of labor. 

A sparse band of organizers began work in South Chi- 
cago in 191 8. They organized South Chicago; they organ- 
ized Joliet and the Calumet basin; they organized Gary 
where no organization had ever been. They worked in 
the East. At last all the workers in the steel mills moved 
and stirred together. In ten states and fifty towns thou- 
sands and thousands of men thought together; thousands 
and thousands of workers who would never know each 
other, who would never see one another, thought the same 
thoughts. The disturbance throughout all the steel towns 
was like a slow, heavy ground swell. There were very 
few organizers and a great numbed of steel workers. 
There was very little money for so great a campaign. 
And yet, steel was organized. 

The mass of workers heaved and swayed — a long, slow 
upheaval. It was as though they advanced on a deep 
unhurried wave. It was like the heaving of mid-ocean. 

How did they come to do this? The book that tells 
of the properties of the United States Steel Company is 
a very large book. It tells of holdings so great that 



Steel and Labor 49 

the ordinary mind cannot grasp its implied power. The 
men who own the steel mills and the mines and the rail- 
ways that brought the steel ore down to the water-front 
and the boats that carried it across the lake, own other 
things in Alleghany County. They control the law courts. 
The mounted state police are at their call. The political 
power — with all burgesses and sheriffs — they own also. 
In the steel country government is possessed nakedly by 
those iron and steel masters and their friends. 

The steel workers' revolt was a dumb revolt, a revolt as 
deep as has been the workers' patience. This mute rebel- 
lion of the steel workers had for its background the sullen, 
coiling smoke, the perpetual soot, the ugly streets ; all these 
things, the long day, the long oppression, were the founda- 
tion of the steel strike and they were its background. 

The men struck even against the paternalism of the 
steel masters who knew so little of what was in the work- 
ers' minds as to imagine that men who wanted freedom 
would be content with welfare work. 

The memory of Homestead, the upheaval in Youngs- 
town, the killing in Braddock, all were part of the strike. 
The flag of hope, the white curtains of the steel makers' 
wives were part of its fabric. The steel strike was not 
made of a simple pattern. The strike was about all these 
things, but it had a deeper portent. 

The concern of these towns is not Life; it is Industry. 
The making of steel has become a monstrous preoccupa- 
tion. Production a game where men's lives are used. 

Life is about human beings. Human beings revolt when 



50 Men and Steel 

their existence is used for the pleasure of kings or for 
making imperialistic wars or for the profits of industry. 

That is why the organization was successful in spite of 
the power of the steel masters. Organizing went on 
underground, it went on through a fleet whispered word. 
Everywhere were spies; everywhere was repression. In 
spite of this 300,000 steel workers struck. There was 
something almost mystical in their unanimous action. 
Stickers appeared which said: "Strike September 22." 

The Strike Demands 

1. Right of collective bargaining> 

2. Reinstatement of all men discharged for union activ- 

ities with pay for time lost. 

3. Eight hour day. 

4. One day's rest in seven. 

5. Abolition of 24-hour shift. 

6. Increases in wages sufficient to guarantee American 

standard of living. 

7. Standard scales of wages in all trades and classifica- 

tion of workers. 

8. Double rates of pay for all overtime after 8 hours, 

holiday and Sunday work. 
Q. Check-off system of collecting union dues. 

10. Principles of seniority to apply in the maintenance, 

reduction and increase of working forces. 

11. Abolition of company unions. 

12. Abolition of physical examination of applicants for 

employment. 



Steel and Labor 51 

The President's Conference 

There was once a king who told the tides to cease 
mounting. The President called an industrial conference. 
This industrial conference met in Washington in early 
October. There were represented the employers, labor 
and the public. There were representatives of the farmers 
and vested interests'. There were two women. 

The representatives of the public were quaint com- 
panions. Whom did John D. Rockefeller represent and 
whom Judge Gary? For what public did Charles Edward 
Russel and Mr. Spargo, the two good Socialists, speak? 

All these people had one quality which bound them 
together; they were all old. The only flower of youth was 
Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. 

All were old in thoughts, representatives of the old 
order. There was no spirit of hope in the air. Every one 
was asking, "What will come of this?" Every one, even 
the great employers, was vague and undirected. 

Perhaps they knew that they were too late, and that their 
tardy argosy of conciliation could make no port in this 
storm. These representatives of the old order gathered 
together in Washington to patch an eleventh hour peace. 
One could hear outside the thundering noise of youth. 

They sat in the big white hall in the Pan-American 
Building, in front of a lovely courtyard where great white 
parrots and blue mackaws sat on perches. Outside in the 
world the people Mr. Gompers represented were being 
killed by those whom Judge Gary was said to control. 



52 Men and Steel 

The Laughter of Europe 

Early in October another conference, having nothing to 
do with the American steel strike in particular, met in 
Washington. It was the first International Industrial 
Congress. Here employers and the representatives of 
labor met from all the countries of the world, except 
America, to discuss matters of interest to both sides. In 
Washington I met one of the Dutch employers. 

"What a surprising country," he said, and he shook with 
laughter. "I am back in the Stone Age. Here I find you 
have not settled the question of collective bargaining. 
What a country!" He chuckled to himself. He could not 
understand it. "You have a steel strike because Mr. Gary 
will not talk to his workmen. I wonder the employers 
allow industry to be stopped." 

But Mr. Gary of the United States Steel Corporation felt 
himself a champion of the right of individual bargaining, 
stemming the incoming flood of organized labor. He felt 
himself a crusader. He received letters of congratulation 
from chambers of commerce, from employers' and manu- 
facturers' associations, from the heads of big business 
concerns. 

But the Dutchman who represented the employers of 
Holland stood laughing in the October sunlight because 
it seemed to him amusing to find himself in a country 
where such questions were unsettled. He went off laugh- 
ing, and his laughter was the judgment of Europe. 



Steel and Labor 53 

"What Meaneth a Tyrant" 

I happened to stop in an old bookshop during the first 
days of the steel strike and there I found a book con- 
taining a quotation from Las Siete Partidas. It was 
written by Alphonso the Wise, a Spanish king of great 
learning, who lived in the thirteenth century. He ex- 
plained "What meaneth a tyrant, and how he useth his 
power in a Kingdom where he hath obtained it." He said: 

"A tyrant doth signify a cruel lord, who, by force or by 
craft, or by treachery, hath obtained power over any realm 
or country^ and such men be of such nature, that when 
once they have grown strong in the land, they love rather 
to work their own profit, though it be to the harm of the 
land, than the common profit of all, for they always live 
in an ill fear of losing it. And that they may be able to 
fulfill this their purpose unencumbered, the wise of old 
have said that they use their power against the people 
in three manners. The first is, that they strive that those 
under their mastry be ever ignorant and timorous, because 
when they be such, they may not be bold to rise against 
them, nor to resist their wills; and the second is, that 
their victims be not kindly and united among themselves, 
in such wise that they trust not one another, for while 
they live in disagreement, they shall not dare to make 
any discourse against their lord, for fear faith and secrecy 
should not be kept among themselves; and the third way 
is, that they strive to make them poor, and to put them 
upon great undertakings, which they can never finish, 



54 Men and Steel 

whereby they may have so much harm that it may never 
come into their hearts to devise anything against their 
ruler. And above all this, have tyrants ever striven to 
make spoil of the strong and to destroy the wise ; and have 
forbidden fellowship and assemblies of men in their land, 
and striven always to know what men said or did; and do 
trust their counsel and the guard of their person rather to 
foreigners, who will serve at their will, than to them of 
the land, who serve from oppression." 



PART TWO 
THE STEEL STRIKE 



CHAPTER VI 

THE STRIKE AND THE STRIKE LEADERS 

The Scope of the Strike 

PEOPLE speak of the steel strike as if it were one 
thing. There was not one steel strike, but fifty. 
There were strikes in fifty different communities. 
Through ten states the steel workers struck. Throughout 
the principality of steel they quit work, not less than three 
hundred thousand of them. The strike swept through this 
country like s, flame. It leaped from town to town and 
from state to state. 

This is something new in the history of strikes, fifty 
towns agreeing like a single community; Pueblo acting in 
concert with Gary, Indiana; Birmingham, Alabama, keep- 
ing step with Rankin; Youngstown and Johnstown both 
shut down together as black as tar kettles. 

Three hundred thousand people thinking the same thing. 
Twenty nationalities striking for the same reason. Over 
the wide expanse of this country one could see the most 
dramatic thing in the world — thousands on thousands of 
patient men doing nothing. Hundreds and thousands of 
patient men staying home. 

These workers were slenderly organized. They were 

57 



58 Men and Steel 

separated by distance. They were divided by race and 
language, but for months they thought together, they 
starved together, they suffered terror, suspense, doubt, 
silence. 

The method used for breaking the strike was to break 
the workers' system of communication with one another. 
To prevent their meeting together in a town. To keep 
one town from knowing what another town was doing. 
Though prevented from thinking together, yet the fifty 
towns and the three hundred thousand men thought sim- 
ultaneously the same thing. 

They were without strike discipline, they were without 
strike benefits; there were communities where no strike 
meetings were allowed to be held, some of the men never 
heard a speaker in their own language during all the strike. 

It was as though some spiritual wave lifted up the 
heaving mass of the people and hurled it irresistibly for- 
ward. 

Here in these towns two ideas of society met and clashed. 
That of the steel masters was definite. It was formulated 
in the eighteenth century. A generation ago, by destroy- 
ing the workers' organization, the great steel masters re- 
stated this theory. It was that they had the right to run 
their business as they chose. They believed this abso- 
lutely. It was not hypocrisy on their part when they 
called this "a matter of principle." Frick believed this 
and Carnegie and the lesser Gary. 

It is the custom of the United States Steel Corporation 
to crush out all rebellion among its workers. In this the 



The Strike and the Strike Leaders 59 

lesser iron masters follow the great ones. I have seen 
two such rebellions crushed by the Steel Corporations. 
One was of the miners in the Mesaba Range in 191 6 
and the other was that of the steel workers in 1919- 

The steel masters would stop all industry, the workers 
of the country could starve before the steel masters would 
discuss matters of common interest with the steel workers' 
representatives. The steel masters, whatever else they 
are, have sincerity. I said this to one of the steel workers. 
He answered: 

"Sincerity like Hell! Sincere like the Croton-bug's 
love for meat." 

The strike of the steel workers was part of the strug- 
gle for freedom. Down the ages people have striven to 
think for themselves. They have striven to govern them- 
selves. Sparticus and the early Christians were part of 
the struggle going on to-day. Through bloody conflict 
men gained such rights to think as they now have. They 
have paid for their incomplete victories by torture, exile 
and blood. A common impulse toward freedom gave the 
people their steadfastness and a desperate and enduring 
patience. 

This upwelling of the workers was contrary to the idea 
of the iron masters, for the business of autocracy is the 
maintenance and increase of its power. 

The steel workers' strike threatened this autocratic 
industrial government. Autocracy had its age-old answer 
to any attempt to limit its authority — repression with 
violence. 



60 Men and Steel 

John Fitzpatrick and William Z. Foster 

Samuel Gompers was first chairman of the National 
Committee. He resigned in favor of John Fitzpatrick, 
President of the Chicago Federation of Labor and most 
beloved by the rank and file of all labor leaders. He con- 
ducted the Chicago end of the strike but the responsibility 
of the Steel Strike rested on William Z. Foster. He pre- 
sented the resolution for organizing the iron and steel 
workers to the Chicago Federation of Labor in 1918. He 
was then engaged in organizing the packing industry. 
Largely through Foster's ability this industry whose 
organization had been totally destroyed in 1907, was reor- 
ganized. They won their demands without striking. 

Foster imagined organizing steel under wartime condi- 
tions, without striking steel. Through lack of money and 
loss of time his first plan was not realized. He worked with 
what materials he had. It had beeji said steel could never 
be organized. Foster and the men working with him 
organized steel. 

Foster is a long New Englander from Taunton, Mass. 
He has a thin face, a kind mouth and eyes, and he can 
work from morning to night, interrupt his work to receive 
a hundred people, and never turn a hair. He is composed, 
confident, unemphatic and imperishably unruffled. The 
waves of the strike break around him, there come to him 
the incessant news of arrests, there come to him daily 
multitudinous problems for decisions. All the minutiae of 
this strike flung over the surface of the whole country, 



The Strike and the Strike Leaders 61 

involving the destinies of the men of a whole great indus- 
try come to him. Never for a moment does Foster hasten 
his tempo. 

One of the reasons of this is that he seems completely 
without ego. Foster never thinks of Foster. He lives com- 
pletely outside the circle of self. Absorbed ceaselessly 
in the ceaseless stream of detail which confronts him. 
A ceaseless stream whose sum spells the fate of 500,000 
men, and all those dependent upon them. 

I have never heard him express himself in any abstrac- 
tion. But the sum of my impression of him is this. It is 
as though he said: 

"All I can do is my best. This is not a fight of to-day 
nor of to-morrow, it is part of the fight that was going on 
at the time of the Caesars. This great steel strike is only 
an incident." 

Once in a while he gets angry over the stupidity of man; 
then you see his quiet is the quiet of a high tension 
machine moving so swiftly it barely hums. 

He is swallowed up in the strike's immensity. What 
happens to Foster does not concern him. I do not believe 
that he spends five minutes in the whole year thinking of 
Foster or Foster's affairs. 

Some Organizers 

Organizing the steel workers was warfare. It needed 
courage to organize steel in the Pittsburgh district. Every 
force of society was against these organizers. The A. F. 



62 Men and Steel 

of L. was treated in the steel towns and in the Allegheny, 
Mahoning and Monongahela valleys as though it were a 
predatory outlaw band. 

The local secretaries were men in their forties most of 
them, men getting gray, old trade unionists. 

These men were threatened with mob violence, they were 
attacked by the press, they were accused of graft, they 
were arrested, released, re-arrested. Some startled men 
were arrested on the charge of criminal syndicalism. 

Suddenly they found themselves outside the pale of 
organized society. It was a strange thing for most of them 
to find themselves opposing society, to have their meetings 
broken up by the State Constabulary, to be unable to get 
a hall in the town, to be constantly subject to arrest and 
to the abuse of the press. They had always had to fight 
employers; now government was against them. 

There was never a more devoted group of men than 
those who worked by Foster's side in the campaign of 
organizing the steel workers. Only men of courage and 
determination could survive. The brunt of the fight around 
Pittsburg was borne by J. G. Brown, a shingle weaver 
from the Northwest, a tall man with quiet ways. They 
pried open town after town. In one steel town after 
another meetings were held where there had been no or- 
ganization allowed by the steel masters in twenty years. 
In one steel town after another the local secretaries estab- 
lished themselves in the face of violence and abuse. 



CHAPTER VII 

VIOLENCE 

Police Violence 

FOSTER and the local organizer had to face abuse 
before the strike. Everything the steel companies 
could do was done to discredit Foster. Everything 
the police and bosses could do to discourage the organiza- 
tion of the workers, was done. 

When the men struck violence by the police increased. 
The Constabulary had already been active. Now the state 
troopers appeared in all the steel towns. They broke 
up meetings. They rode their horses into the workers' very 
houses. In Braddock no assemblies of people were per- 
mitted. They rode down men coming from mass. Steel 
workers could not assemble. They chased the children 
of Father Kazinci's parish school. 

"It is terror, you know/' one of the organizers said to 
me, "when you're on foot and they ride down upon you 
and you see their three-foot riot clubs raised above your 
head." 

The idea seemed to be to terrorize the workers. There 
were besides deputized gunmen. Workers were arrested 
by the hundreds, held, and no charges preferred against 
them. Then they were fined. 

63 



64 Men and Steel 

Constabulary in Br ad dock 

In Braddock no one could tell why the State Constab- 
ulary were there. The Burgess didn't know, nor the 
President of the Council, nor the Councilnien. The Edgar 
Thompson Mills had never shut down completely. There 
was never any trouble in Braddock. On Braddock' s front 
street there was no sign of a strike. Life went on as usual. 
But one day, unasked, the Constabulary rode into Brad- 
dock on their beautiful horses, and there they stayed. 

During the first days of the strike they patrolled the 
streets where the workers lived. I saw two of them riding 
down a mean street. They rode abreast and had their 
clubs in their hands, looking very splendid and martial. 
The word went through the courts and alleys, "The Cos- 
sacks are here!" All the little boys ran out to stare at 
them. Women came out of houses and stood on door- 
steps, their babies in their arms; striking steel workers 
came out from courtyards. It was as good as a circus 
parade. The Cossacks walked their horses to the end of 
the street; then they turned and smartly trotted their 
horses back. They drove the people from the street. 
They drove the women and children back from their stoops 
into the houses. 

Both troopers were young fellows; one was boyish and 
blonde and the older one was dark with a sullen look to 
him. One tossed a joke to the other as they came. They 
looked as if they were having a good time seeing the 
people scurry into the houses like frightened rabbits. 



Violence 65 

At a corner opposite me a man stood staring at them. 
He looked like a Pole, with high cheek-bones and bright 
blue eyes, his blonde mustache curled up sharply. The 
Constabulary came trotting down on him. 

A woman near me took hold of my arm and said: 

"Come inside, missus; you'll get hurt." 

The troopers had an argument with the man. The 
man said: 

"I'm standing on my own stoop." 

"Get into the house, you ," said one who raised 

his club and made as though to ride up the stoop. The 
man very slowly went into his house. They rode on 
leaving an empty street behind them. 



66 Men and Steel 

Brutality of Power 

When I went into the Strike Headquarters in Pittsburg 
a stout man, tipped back in a chair, was telling a story of 
what had happened in Clairton before the strike. 

"We couldn't hold a meeting in Clairton ; we couldn't get 
a permit. We hired an empty lot from a striker and held 
a meeting there. The Cossacks broke it up. They tore 
down an American flag. They trampled it under their 
horses' hoofs. That started trouble with the ex-service 
boys. Seven was arrested and fined." 

"But/' said the organizer, "even if he was drunk what 
made him tear down the flag?" 

We used to talk about the psychology of the Constab- 
ulary. We could never understand the things they did. 
There seemed to be no answer to them. It tasted of un- 
reason. Why should they tear down an American flag? 
Why should they chase babies going to school? The 
breaking up of meetings — that was easy. It was the detail 
we could not fathom. 

What has happened to a man when his instinctive ges- 
ture is to strike a frightened woman in the face, like the 
Slovak woman in Braddock to whose house I went one day? 

As I came in to the Braddock office some one was won- 
dering : 

"But why should he slap her face?" 

The organizer explained to me : "The Cossacks were 
searching a Slovak lady's house." 

I went to see the woman. In her house piles of clothes 



Violence 67 

newly dried lay in disorder on the lounge. The dishes had 
not been washed. The work was not getting on. In the 
midst of this sat a bulky young woman. It was getting 
hard for her to do her work. Her time was near — she 
moved with effort. 

She spoke little English and told her story in her own 
language. The girl with me translated. 

"She says her husband and the boarder was asleep 
upstairs. The Cossacks came in. She screamed. The 
Cossacks said, 'Shut your mouth/ She screamed again." 

"Then he do this," the woman interrupted. She made 
a gesture of striking, negligent, powerful, contemptuous. 

"He hit her across the face with his glove," the girl 
explained. 

I asked, "Why did they search the house?" 

"My husband, he a striker," she explained. She turned 
to the girl and spoke in Slovak. The girl translated: 

"She says they broke her trunks up." 

"Why?" I asked. 

The woman shook her head. She could not tell. The 
Cossacks had come splendid and contemptuous and hit her 
in the face, had strewn things around, and broke her 
trunks. 

The stories of beatings and arrests came in an endless 
flood. There was no end to them. Within two days one 
was drenched with them. In three days one was saturated. 
They made no more impression. They became part of life. 



68 Men and Steel 

Fosters Office 

Through Foster's office flowed a constant stream of 
people with stories of violence. The telephone buzzed 
news of arrests, of beatings. Women with shawls over 
their heads came in for news of missing husbands. 

"The head office of the National Committee for Organ- 
izing Iron and Steel Workers" implies size, power, and 
extended organization. It sounds imposing. All that is 
imposing about it is the name. This head office was one 
small room. In it were Foster and Foster's stenographer. 
There was, besides, Edwin Newdick, the publicity director. 
Part of the time there was an extra stenographer. As far 
as the steel strike was concerned, they had no such thing 
as publicity in the modern sense of the term. The United 
States Steel Corporation did all the publicity. 

A glance at Foster's office showed many posters on the 
walls; the poster "Americans All" — our foreign nationali- 
ties fighting together under our flag. Next to this an 
announcement of Mother Jones' meeting; another one an- 
nouncing a meeting at which Foster would speak. One or 
two cartoons, a blackboard, two tables and a desk, and a 
picture of the patient face of murdered Fanny Sellins. 

It is the quietest office I have ever been in. No one ever 
gets excited, Every one works ceaselessly and without 
flurry. All day long people came to see Foster. Foster 
talked with any one who wanted to talk with him. He was 
as accessible as the Post-Office Building opposite. 



Violence 69 

Fanny Sellins 

Fanny Sellins was a woman organizer who was murdered 
by gunmen. The picture of her bruised face is hung in 
every organizer's office. It is a little picture on a post- 
card. In Foster's office it was tacked up on a bulletin 
board as though at random. From its inconspicuous place 
it dominated the office. Whoever came in turned to look 
at it. It made no difference how often one came in, one's 
eyes, in spite of oneself, traveled to the post-card on the 
wall. 

When the strike was still young I came in one day. A 
little old woman stood before it. Her hair had the pure 
white of extreme age. She wore a basque with lace on it, 
and a bonnet that had a touch of purple. A very neat little 
old woman, who looked like everybody's grandmother. She 
was standing before the picture and talking as though to 
herself. 

"I often wonder it wasn't me they got. Whenever I 
look at the picture of her I wonder it's not me lying on 
the ground. They shot her from behind when she bent over 
children to protect them. They knew what they were 
doing. They went out to get Fanny Sellins. Bending over 
them children with her back turned, they shot her." 

Every one stopped to listen to this old woman. She 
sighed and turned toward us. 

"Oh, well, I must now be going. Is any one to carry my 
bag?" 

There was a group of young men in the office. They 



70 Men and Steel 

had come in from some of the surrounding steel towns. 
There were always people in Foster's office. They all came 
forward. 

"We'll all go with you, Mother," they said. 

She went out, the foreign boys walking shelteringly 
about her. Mother Jones and Fanny Sellins are the only 
two American women that foreign steel workers know 
about. 

Third Degree 

One night I sat late in Foster's quiet office, talking with 
Mrs. Foster. Sylvia Manley, Foster's daughter, was there 
working. The men had gone. The door opened as though 
blown by a wind, and Mestovic, the organizer from Clair- 
ton, came in shoving before him two Slovak boys. Mes- 
tovic was a black flame flickering in the wind of anger. 
The intense and passionate allegiance which some men give 
to their country, he gives to the Union. By his own effort 
he brought in 1,200 men. He has been arrested, fined, 
threatened. Each threat and each arrest was like oil 
thrown on a blazing fire. He is a Croatian and his lean 
dark face looks as though he had Gypsy blood. He was 
quiet in the excitement of his anger. 

"Show your wrists," he said. The two boys stolidly put 
out their wrists. They were bruised and chafed; one bled. 

"You should see them when they got loose four or five 
hours ago." 

We asked what had happened. 

"Handcuffed all day to beds in hotel room." He told 



Violence 71 

the story with quiet violence. The boys threw in an unemo- 
tional detail like, 'Then the Cossack hit me and called me 
'you damned Bolshevist.' " 

"A scab lived in his house and the landlady throw him 
out. Some one break his trunk. He go for constabulary* 
.Six or seven constabulary come and get boys. They take 
them to hotel where they stay. They put them in separate 
rooms. They don't arrest them. They don't take them to 
jail. They twist their arms, they handcuff them, they 
fasten this boy to iron rail of bed so he bend over. He 
stay there from nine to half-past four." 

"I cry and cry," said the boy. "My wrists swell up. I 
ask they give me a drink. I ask they loose up handcuff. 
Them only make handcuff tighter. I don't know what I 
do. They say 'you damn Bolshevik ! Your friend confess ; 
better for you you confess too.' I know he don't confess. 
How can he?" 

"This boy, they beat him," said Mestovic, pointing to the 
other. "They beat him so his nose bleed. They give him 
cloth so blood don't get on carpet, but it get on carpet all 
the same." 



72 Men and Steel 

The Striker Who Came to Be Reassured 

In the third week of the strike I saw a young fellow 
standing in Foster's office, as though waiting for some one. 
Every one was busy. People came and went. For a long 
time no one spoke to him. He waited in good-tempered 
patience. At last some one asked him what he wanted. 
He wanted advice. He had ninety cents left. He wanted 
to know what to do. He did not want strike benefits. 
He wanted moral support and encouragement. He wanted 
to know how he was going to get along. He was a for- 
eigner and a young married man. Beside his ninety cents 
he had some chickens. He had good neighbors who would 
give him vegetables from their garden. He told his story 
deprecatingly, smiling in an embarrassed fashion over his 
difficulties. The people in the office talked it up with him. 
He knew there would be no strike benefits. He had the 
contact he wanted and he went away, still with his smile, 
his assets, his ninety cents, his good neighbors, and his 
will to stick it out, and there were thousands like him in the 
strike. 



CHAPTER VIII 

STRIKE MEETINGS 

Pittsburg Meetings 

IN Pittsburg no one but the steel workers knew there 
was a strike, for picketing was not allowed. When 
the strike occurred Sheriff Haddock deputized five 
thousand men. He said that there were only five thousand 
people striking in the Pittsburg district. He deputized 
one man for every striker. 

The strikers stayed home in Pittsburg. Some went out 
to find other jobs. Some met together in pool rooms. You 
could find them in their houses. You could see them nights 
at the Labor Temple. At the Labor Temple strike meet- 
ings were permitted. Strike meetings were not allowed 
elsewhere in the City of Pittsburg. There was not at any 
time a hint of riot; there was not at any time a hint of 
trouble. But no meetings were allowed. 

The Labor Temple sits on a hill far off from the steel 
mills. It meant a ten cent fare to come to a meeting, or a 
walk of miles. Distances are far in Pittsburg. 

Once when the American Federation of Labor tried to 
hold a meeting in a' hall nearer the strikers' homes, the 
streets around the hall were dark with people. People 

73 



74 Men and Steel 

were huddled on the corners; people formed a square on 
streets leading to the hall. A light cordon of police had 
been thrown about the hall. In front of the hall stood 
four policemen. A patrol wagon was standing near. We 
came in a jitney and were allowed to pass. Inside there 
was no one. Downstairs in the vacated bar-room with its 
clinging smell of stale beer stood the German owner of 
the hall. He was apologetic. Three policemen blustered 
up, a good-looking sergeant and two others. 

"You can't meet here/' they said. "No meetings/' they 
repeated. 

The Socialist Party met in this hall without permits. 
Foreign language groups met without permits. Striking 
steel workers could not meet. The American Federation of 
Labor was outlawed. 

The organizers and a lawyer wrangled with the police. 
Both sides grew hot. Outside in the darkness the steel 
workers waited. There was a feeling of tenseness in the 
air. A very little would have made trouble. Outside the 
police were handling the crowd pleasantly, urging them to 
walk on. The crowd flowed along like sluggish water. 
Men muttered their dissatisfaction in their own tongues and 
sullenly obeyed. 



Strike Meetings 75 

Father Kazinci's Church 

One Sunday I stood in Homestead trying to get a car 
for Braddock. The cars were filled; men hung from them 
like swarms of bees. Homestead was moving to Braddock. 
There was an exodus. Those who could not get on cars, 
walked. I got a place at last. There were also women in 
the crowd. I wondered why the working population of 
Homestead went to Braddock. All the cars that came into 
Braddock were crowded. Those from Bessemer and those 
from McX£eesport, and cars coming from Rankin, all were 
black with crowding men. 

It was a good-natured crowd; it had a holiday air. Men 
joked one another. Men called out to friends. It seemed 
like a time of festival. I got off at Main Street, following 
the crowd. They all converged at St. Michael's Church. 
Far down the street men were standing. The church was 
packed. Then I saw every one was going to Father 
Kazinci's church. There were no labor meetings allowed in 
McKeesport, no meetings in Rankin; Homestead had one 
meeting a week. But the steel workers could come to hear 
Father Kazinci preach. 

They made way for me. I managed to squeeze in. In 
that church there was an air of happiness. They had 
escaped from the Constabulary. The Constabulary could 
not follow them to church. There were old women with 
faces wrinkled like dried figs, wide-bosomed mothers, their 
faces still brown from the sun. There were children. Men 
knelt in the aisles; the aisles were black with men. The 



76 Men and Steel 

church was more crowded than the organizer's office. Their 
restlessness and anxiety were gone. They stood quiet, re- 
leased, free for a moment. Then full-throated this audience 
sang a chant of the sixth century — men and women and 
children. The Slovaks have never lost the custom of com- 
munal singing. 

Then Father Kazinci preached. He spoke in Slovak. 
I could not understand. Later I asked him what he had 
preached. He said, "I preach to them about their own 
weapons. Against them are violence, lies, repression. 
They have only their patience, their faith, their endurance 
— and then I told them the story of Pharaoh. He would 
not let the Children of Israel out of bondage." 



Strike Meetings 77 

Meeting in Homestead 

After twenty years labor meetings were permitted in 
Homestead for the first time. I went to one such meeting. 
It was held in a small hall. The room was packed with 
the same quiet men I had often seen in the National Com- 
mittee Offices. 

On the platform sat six troopers. They were in their 
uniforms of dark gray. They carried their clubs and their 
revolvers were strapped to their sides. It seemed more 
like a police court than a labor meeting. The audience 
was foreign. Only a few spoke English as their native 
language. But the speaking was all in English. Foreign 
language speakers were not permitted. 

It was not because there had been disorder in Homestead 
that the Constabulary was there. There had never been 
disorder. The Constabulary was there to censor the meet- 
ing. The organizer spoke only in generalizations. He 
spoke in platitudes. The men listened with grave atten- 
tion, but their eyes were fixed on the state troopers. They 
eyed them with dislike and anger. They kept steady eyes 
upon them. 

These meetings were allowed once a week as a conces- 
sion to free speech, after they had arrested Mother Jones 
and thousands of workers had milled around the jail 
demanding her release. The authorities came to her in 
her cell and asked if she could send the workers home. 
She came out and spoke to them. She got them in a good 
humor. She sent them home. Now they may have meet- 



78 Men and Steel 

ings in Homestead — with the state Constabulary on the 
platform. 

They were sterile meetings; there might as well have 
been none. But this fight of the rank and file was not fed 
by oratory; it was not made by excitement. There was 
behind it a terrible patience. The men sat there rigid, 
listening to unimportant things said in a language they did 
not understand. Whenever there was a meeting they came 
and faced the State Constabulary, who looked down inso- 
lently upon them. 

Marching Men 

A wide country, brown farms, comfortable frame houses 
shaded by trees, round white clouds rolling over a blue 
sky, a keen wind blowing dust; a white road filled with 
men, a road as crowded as Broadway at noon; men and 
boys walking in groups, men by twos talking together, men 
walking alone plugging along with their heads down, 
walking fast as though late to an appointment. Here and 
there like bright punctuation marks, women. A few young 
girls walking swiftly, most of the women accompanying 
husbands. Brave looking women, placid, wide hipped; 
three thousand men and women pouring over a road. , 

These are steel workers from Sharon and Farrell leav- 
ing Pennsylvania to go to a meeting in Ohio. The men 
have on white collars; they are freshly shaved; they are 
neatly dressed in their best clothes. They look as if they 
were going to Mass. There is a cheerful air of holiday 



Strike Meetings 79 

among them. Some of the younger fellows sing; a few 
of them joke each other; most of them swing along silent, 
striking out toward Ohio. 

In Farrell no meetings can be held. Steel workers in 
Farrell and Sharon are not allowed to discuss their busi- 
ness. They have to walk many miles to go to a meeting. 
Every week they file out, hundreds of them, to learn how 
their strike is going. During the week they must sit silent 
and quiet in their homes. They must sit quiet in 
their homes and watch the scabs going to work. They 
have nothing to keep them from doubt, so they step out 
hopefully to get away from the silence. They stand all 
the afternoon under the sky, listening to speakers. 

They have to bring home faith enough to last them a 
week. Back in Farrell there is silence, doubt, isolation 
and the threatening smoke of the mills. 

As we went across the state line into Ohio I walked with 
four boys. They were American born. They were all 
counted as Hunkies. As we went across the line one said: 

"Here we are back in America." 



80 Men and Steel 

Meeting in Youngstown 

In the Youngstown Office there was a blackboard. A 
list of towns was written on it. Opposite the name of each 
town was a speaker's name. There were a great many 
meetings in the Youngstown district. There were few 
organizers. Every organizer had to speak at two or three 
meetings every night. Youngstown organizers had no time 
for play. They moved incessantly from one strike meeting 
to another. 

I went with an organizer to East Youngstown. The 
hall was up a steep hill. The street was dark and rutted 
by rain. Coming up the stairs the noise of the meeting 
came to us in a roar; the heat of the hall rushed out at us 
like the blast of a furnace. Men were talking at the top 
of their voices. Men were arguing together; men were 
laughing. The men were happy and excited. Their eyes 
flashed. They were rested and gay; they were ready for 
anything. The strike was young. 

They have not forgotten that four years before they 
had swirled out from the shops and mills in a mighty flood. 
Then they had been leaderless; their rebellion was unfor- 
mulated. Now they were directed; they knew what they 
wanted. They felt they would get it. Packed in this hall 
they felt their united strength. It was a young, gay 
strength. It had an irresistible quality. The organizer 
said to me: "If they could keep this spirit they could win 
any strike." They had an easy confidence in themselves. 
For three weeks no smoke had stained Youngstown's chim- 



Strike Meetings 81 

neys. For three weeks the saffron glare had gone from 
the sky. The sky had been undisturbed by the sudden 
fury of the blast furnace. 

A foreign speaker began; the laughter stopped. The 
men raised earnest faces to him. From the platform you 
could look down into them. The steel workers are wide 
shouldered, strong looking men. Most of these men were 
of Slavic origin: Poles, Slovaks, Croatians. There were 
also a few Italians, some Rumanians, a few Negroes. I 
could not understand the speaker; I could understand the 
silent men. This room was packed with quiet rebellion. 
There were fifteen more halls that night in the Youngs- 
town district filled with workers. Every race had its meet- 
ing. Rooms packed with revolt; halls filled with men 
determined to win, men greatly tired of conditions under 
which they had been living. 

This Youngstown crowd was an excited crowd; the 
tingling quality of it caught me up. In another moment 
they would have gone cheering down the street, and I 
would have gone after them had they gone. 

Their mood .changed. It was as though clouds had 
darkened the sky. Their faces became hard. The faces 
of the crowd mirrored their anger as the sea mirrors an 
approaching storm. I heard the name of Fanny Sellins. 
The organizer was speaking earnestly, without gesture, 
bent over slightly from the hips, talking down into the 
faces of the crowd. "Fanny Sellins" and again "Fanny 
Sellins" I heard him repeat, while the face of the crowd 
darkened and grew still with silent menace. 



CHAPTER IX 

SENATORS AND STEEL WORKERS 

Senate Investigation 

WHEN the workers in important industries strike 
it is customary to hold a Senate investigation. 
During the first ten days of the strike four- 
teen people had been killed. All of them were strikers. 
Fanny Sellins had been murdered. The number of 
wounded was not known. People nursed their wounds in 
silence. Gary was under martial law. There were no 
civil liberties in Pennsylvania. A million dollars a day 
was the loss in wages to the steel workers. The loss to 
the steel companies was not calculated. The industries 
dependent on steel were slowed down. 

Mr. Gary's eighteenth century principles, which give a 
man control over his own business, were at stake. 

The Senators inquired into these facts. The investiga^ 
tion took place in a courtroom in the Post Office Building 
in Pittsburg. In the center of the room is a square en- 
closure. Here sat the middle-aged-to-elderly gentlemen, 
the Senators. One came from the South, one from New 
England, one from the Southwest, and one from the 
Middlewest. The lawyer for the steel corporation and the 

82 



Senators and Steel Workers 83 

lawyer for the workers sat within the enclosure. A small 
group of steel operators sat with them. 

The investigation was only interesting to the steel 
workers. They had come in numbers. They stood quietly, 
filling one side of the court house allotted to them, while the 
"general public" sat in a sparse row at the far end of the 
hall. 

Before the Senators flowed a ceaseless stream of people. 
These were all dressed in their best clothes. The men were 
shaved. They came before the Government in their best. 
Few spoke English well. Many of the women testified 
through interpreters. 

They told before the Senate the stories of violence which 
one could not escape in Foster's office or in the offices of 
the local secretaries. They told without emotion the stories 
of beatings and arrests. They seemed resigned. They did 
not seem surprised or indignant. For days one found 
before the Senate decent respectable folk telling fantastic 
stories of abuse. Their defenselessness and respectability 
were what one remembered of them. 

Bullied Workers 

A Slovak woman from Dinora, with dark hair and pink 
cheeks, testified. This is my memory of what she said: 

"My husband and my children were in bed. I go to 
the store before they get up. I must go to the store early 
and get what they need. I go on street walking to the 
store. Some one behind me call 'Scab !' " 



84 Men and Steel 

She was caught in the picket line between the picketers 
and the scabs. A negro took hold of her arm. He pointed 
a gun at her and arrested her. 

"He called me bad names, too/' she said. She was taken 
to jail and told to pay a fine. She said she would not 
pay — she was not guilty ; but because she had a six-months- 
old baby she finally paid. But they kept her in jail all 
day and into the night while her husband looked for her. 
She testified there were colored strike-breakers and that 
negroes were deputized. While she was in jail, terribly 
beaten men were brought in. 

"My wife and children were sick/' said a man from 
Monessen who worked in the wire mill. "I was going for 
the doctor. Some one said, 'Don't go down there. The 
State Constable is there taking people to jail/ I had to 
go back — they got clubs/' 

The State Constable with a horse rode him down. He 
was arrested and held for $500 bail. He pleaded with 
them to send the doctor to his wife and children. He 
worked eleven hours a day and thirteen at night. He 
worked through a long shift Sundays, and was striking for 
better conditions and for eight hours. He had taken out 
his first papers, but had never had time to become a citizen. 

He was young and full of high vitality, and he told his 
story of his arrest with an air of naive surprise as though 
he were asking himself, "What the devil did the State Con- 
stable pounce on me for when I was just going to the 
doctor? And they searched me too — that's queerer yet." 

A Croat, who makes wire in Monessen, was an angry 



Senators and Steel Workers 85 

witness. They had arrested him, found him unarmed, and 
told him: "If you don't go to work you must go to jail." 

He was a strongly built young man and his fury 
streamed out in his answer. He was not polite to the 
Senators. The representatives of the higher government 
of the United States did not impress him as it did the other 
steel workers. To most steel workers the government is 
an august thing which they respect. He had been in 
America thirteen years. They asked him why he was not 
a citizen and he flung at them with passion: 

" 'Cause I don't get time!" 

Later he told them, still rudely, and with anger: 

"I'd like to learn. If I'm going to work eight hours 
I'm going to learn. I like this country. I like America. 
If I take a day off I have no money to pay board. Sure, 
I like to learn about the government of this country." 

But his manner said, "You fools ! How do you expect 
me to learn when I work half the time night and twelve 
hours ?" 

As a final proof of his fatigue he flung at them that he 
hadn't been to a movie for over a year. 

Not every one was bewildered and not every one was 
resigned. Now and then a conscious young fellow would 
tell you all you wanted to know about the strike, like a 
young man who said he worked in the Mayo Mill at 17^ 
cents an hour in 1914. He was in the Sixth Engineers 
during the war. He came back March, 1919^ and was 
demobilized in April. 

"I had a mother to support. They offered me a shovel- 



86 Men and Steel 

ing wheelbarrow job. I turned it down. I got a job in 
the steel works on September 3rd. Clothes cost six or 
seven dollars a week. You can't keep on wearing your 
clothes. They get soaked with oil. Your shoes don't last. 
The heat burns the soles off your shoes." 

"Did many men strike in your mill?" 

"They all struck." His answer was like a sharp salute. 

"Why did you strike?" 

"I thought it was my duty because I couldn't get any 
satisfaction from the Company. They patted me on the 
shoulder and said, 'We will give you a good job.' They 
urged the men to come to work and then the Company 
gives them guns. We were told the Superintendent car- 
ried in whiskey to the scabs." 

"What are you striking for?" they asked him. 

"Eight hours, more pay, better conditions and more 
safety devices," he rapped out on them, barking it like a 
command on parade. 

Outside Arrests 

There were called as witnesses some odd men who were 
not strikers. Such as the man from the grocery store in 
Homestead, with a greenish pale face and a long plaster on 
his head. He had been an American citizen for three years. 
He was standing in the doorway of his store when a State 
policeman came in and knocked him down and beat him. 
He never knew what he was charged for, but was held 
in $300 bail and fined $6.35. He gave his testimony in a 



Senators and Steel Workers 87 

low tone, unassertive, almost apologetic. He seemed to be 
questioning the Senators and the crowd at large as to why 
this strange fate should have overtaken him. 

The hotel keeper from Homestead has been an American 
citizen for ten years. He was a puffy, inoffensive man, 
not accustomed to asserting himself. He, too, seemed 
puzzled like the man of the grocery store. He had come 
from Germany and had his hotel for six years. He was 
beaten up and arrested. They chased him into the hotel 
and tried to ride the horses in after him. He was asked 
whether they often rode their horses into the houses. 

"They rode their horses into the women's houses/' he 
answered. 

Later some one explained the case of the hotel man and 
the grocer to me. "Most likely they gave the strikers 
credit or let them come to their places. Any one sympa- 
thetic to the strikers is liable to get beat up." 

It was the matter-of-factness of this that is its most 
fantastic element. Every one had accepted the troopers; 
every one had accepted the fact that strikers get beaten. 
The Constabulary and beatings had become part of the 
strikers' lives in Allegheny County, 



88 Men and Steel 

Docile Steel Workers 

There are plenty of satisfied workers, plenty of people 
who have nothing against the United States Steel Corpora- 
tion. 

There was one gentle old fellow who testified a long 
lime. He spent thirty-three years of his life working in 
the mills. An old man, gray of face, gray of hair. He 
seemed very tired. He seemed dim and bewildered. He 
works twelve hours a day and doesn't think it is too much. 
He has worked twelve hours for thirty-three years. He 
got 17 cents an hour when he started and now gets 33 
cents. He has nine children, five boys and four girls. 
All but one are married. Life has given him all he desires. 
He owns his home. He thinks he is glad to work twelve 
hours a day. He is the perfect product of the system of 
the Steel Company. There would be no disturbance in the 
steel mills if all were like him. He is an Englishman, and 
he doesn't know what they want to go out making trouble 
for. He accepts twelve hours of work like a law of nature. 

Another witness like him was a man, thirteen years in 
this country, now making $4.32 a day. He had no com- 
plaint against the Steel Corporation. He shoveled coal 
ten hours a day. 

"What was the strike about?" 

He shook his head. He did not know. 

Would he like to learn English? Yes, but he was too 
old. 

"If I go to school now some one laugh at me/' he said 



Senators and Steel Workers 89 

deprecatingly. He intends to go on all his life shoveling 
coal for ten hours a day. He thinks he is content. 

There were many witnesses like this, slow old men, long 
in the service of U. S. Steel, old men without complaint. 
They did not know what the strike was about. They did 
not want to know. Dim, patient people, uncomplaining, 
men whose desires did not transcend a steady job. 



90 Men and Steel 

Americanizers 

After a few weeks of deliberation, the Senators turned 
in the report of their investigation. They recommended 
a shorter work-day; they admitted the Constabulary had 
overstepped the bounds in some cases. Americanization of 
the workers, they felt was what they needed. 

I was discussing this question of Americanization with 
a striker standing on the street corner of Braddock. The 
smoke rolled up in a mountain of gray and white before 
us. A flicker of sulphur colored flame blossomed for a 
moment at the summit of one of the mill chimneys. The 
street was empty but for an old woman with her hair tied 
up in a black kerchief, dragging some wood along, and 
another carrying groceries. 

"Being a citizen/' he said, "that means first of all loving 
your country, don't it? You have got to love it to begin 
with." 

Two state troopers turned in at the far end of the street 
and paced slowly up. 

"That's hard to do," he said, "when you live in the town 
with them fellows." 



CHAPTER X 

OUTSIDE PEOPLE 

Comfortable People 

PITTSBURG sprawls into far suburbs where the 
comfortable people live. It was not by chance that 
few of these came to the Senate Investigation. 
They were not greatly interested in the steel strike. There 
must have been some who wondered why three hundred 
thousand people walked out, and some of the well-to-do 
women may have felt concerned. I did not meet any; but 
I heard that indignant women met in the women's clubs 
to condemn the strikers. There were many people who 
were angry at the workers for striking. They called the 
workers Bolsheviks. There were others who thought that 
the workers were only misled. These called the leaders 
Bolsheviks. 

A long shadow was cast by Lenin, and it fell cold across 
the steel masters. It was convenient to think that the steel 
strike was an echo of Soviet Russia. 

There were a great many people who had a great desire 
to prove that Russian money was behind the steel strike 
and that "German gold" was behind Russia, that one could 
hate the workers' inconvenient revolt openly and com- 
pletely. 

91 



92 Men and Steel 

No one seemed disturbed that the workers' liberties were 
taken from them. A Roman Catholic Priest and a Lutheran 
clergyman lifted up their voices. That was all. 

The comfortable people whom I met talked about pro- 
duction. The country needed it; now the workers were 
stopping it, they said, because of outside agitators. The 
material from which this strike was made lay before them 
in plain view. It was easy to learn. One might see it dis- 
played in every meeting of the men; one could find out 
about it by going through the towns. After a while I had 
the impression that the world in which the steel workers 
lived was invisible to most of the comfortable people. One 
of the comfortable people said to me : 

"The slums of the steel towns are awful. You don't have 
to look for them ; the street cars run right through them. 

"The steel companies have made an incredible amount of 
money. To see how money is squandered is disgusting. 
Every little girl thinks she must have her electric car and 
a thousand dollar fur coat. 

"But I think Judge Gary is right. I admire his stand. 
Every man has a right to run his business as he pleases. " 

The Convention 

A convention of the Pennsylvania State Federation of 
Labor came together to demand that the Governor restore 
the civil liberties to the people. In the Labor Temple you 
could find out at that time what labor in Pennsylvania 
looked like. These were not business agents; these were 



Outside teo^ie 93 

the workers, miners and carpenters, plumbers and men 
from the building trades; men doing every k(nd of labor 
that is performed in the state. They filled the hall; they 
filled the gallery. No state convention was ever so large. 

The orators who had come to enthuse them remained to 
quiet them. James Maurer had to use a strong hand to 
hold them. Their resistance clothed itself in words and 
acts. This convention was something new. This was the 
first time that a unit of the American Federation of Labor 
had come together for political ends. They had come with 
a threat of using their combined power to protect the liber- 
ties of the workers. 

"We want to know/' they said, "if the Constitution of 
the United States exists for the privileged classes only, or 
if it applies to us too." 

The first resolution was that steel, coal, and the railways 
should not settle their difficulties independently. This was 
a demand for a closer unity, a foreshadowing of a power 
to come when the wish in this resolution should be ex- 
pressed in mighty action. In the convention you could 
see labor feeling its way to a new power. 

One man spoke against this resolution. His name was 
Feeley. He was voted from the floor. At his words pan- 
demonium broke loose. It was hard for Maurer to quiet 
the men. They called Feeley "stool pigeon." They wanted 
him recalled. The sense of that meeting was that coal, 
steel, and iron belonged together, and that they should use 
their power together. Feeley's opposition brought the 



94 Men and Steel 

convention to a climax. While they met they did not lose 
their tension. 

The steel strike had left the mills; it had left the river 
bottoms. Because the workers had been ridden down by 
the Constabulary, because they had been unjustly arrested 
in numbers, because the employers had pledged themselves 
to break organized labor, because the Attorney General 
had commended mob action in the steel towns — labor in the 
entire state of Pennsylvania rediscovered the maxim that 
an injury to one is the concern of all. Because of the 
injury done to the striking steel workers, labor asserted 
itself. The workers of Pennsylvania voted the recom- 
mendation of a general strike if the liberties of the people 
were not returned to them. 

The workers put a dream into a resolution at this con- 
vention. It was the dream of the solidarity of labor. 



Outside People 95 

Quiet Towns 

The steel towns had no news of what was going on in 
the Convention Hall. The papers in the steel towns did 
not speak of the convention. The mass of steel workers 
did not know that labor was having a convention for them. 
There were many towns where they learned it only through 
a meager strike bulletin. There were many strikers who 
knew nothing about it. The steel towns in Alleghany 
County were muffled in silence. The workers could never 
tell how the strike was going in those towns. The news 
came from the other side. The papers told the workers 
that the strike was over. The bosses told them the strike 
was over. Tradesmen told them to go back to work. 
Silence followed the violence of the Constabulary. Inac- 
tion and silence wrapped the strike around. 

In Monessen and Donora, in Rankin, Homestead, and 
Braddock, the mills always made smoke. Some men in 
Allegheny County always went to work. The strike went 
on underground. There was no drifting population on the 
street. In their homes and in their meetings there was an 
ominous quiet. The quiet was the quiet of terror. 

Terror and suspicion hung over these towns like a thick 
cloud. But the strike went on, as though like a living thing 
it had a life of its own. It did not live in meetings, it 
could not live in the congregations of men, it had no expres- 
sion, but underneath the silent terror flowed the current 
of the strike. After a time this seemed the normal way of 
living. After a time I forgot that there were places where 
workers were allowed to discuss their affairs. 



PART THREE 

SILENCE 



CHAPTER XI 

DARK TOWNS 

Mother Jones 

MOTHER JOXES wove in and out of the steel 
strike. She was never long away. During her 
absence from Pittsburg one could hear of her 
being in Joliet or in the Calumet Basin. She had greater 
intimacy with the workers than any one else in America. 

She is their "Mother/' 

The foreign workers rarely meet Americans. The only 
Americans that some meet are bosses, landlords or trades- 
men. 

Mother Jones is the only American woman that thou- 
sands of them have ever spoken to. She goes about sur- 
rounded with the protecting love of young men whose 
names she dees not know. She goes up and down the coun- 
try, and with her walks the memory of the long fight of 
the working people of America. It is a matter of record 
that her home is wherever there is a fight for justice. No 
minor prophet ever foretold the downfall of an arrogant 
city in bitterer words than she foretells the downfall of 
what she calls "the ruling powers." 

When the convention ended I went with Mother Jones 

90 



100 Men and Steel 

to Ohio. She sat beside me in the train talking; she talked 
almost as to herself. You might fancy that you heard the 
heart of the workers muttering. 

"There was never a convention like this before. They 
never met before to talk only about liberty. Oh, it's com- 
ing; it's coming! . . . There's a terrible bitter tide rolling 
up and welling up in this country. There's gall mixed with 
the mud that's churned under the workers' feet in the city 
alleys. . . . 

"Look at these towns; look out of the window. Nothing 
to rest the eyes. I say to you there has never been a 
cruder despotism than there is in this country to-day. 
Look out there! Look at the stacks of the mills like trees 
in a black forest! Look at the blast furnaces and smoke 
as far as your eye can reach, and the wealth that comes 
out of it made by the blood of slaves." 

She cannot endure the suffering of the workers' children. 
She cannot endure the indifference of rich women. The 
two in her mind are sharply related. The indifferent 
women are blood-stained creatures to her. Brutal, cruel, 
abandoned, she makes you feel this. Exaggerations in her 
mouth become real. She talks about "Brutal women hung 
about with the decorations they have bought with the blood 
of children." This is to her a literal fact. 

"Oh, God, the little children — to face it all! And our 
women are so brutal. They don't dream that in the 
great upheaval that's coming, their own children will meet 
with the same conditions. Then people go to church! 
"They're mad as they were in the days of Babylon!" 



Dark Towns 101 

Steubenville 

We got to Steubenville. The clang of trolleys, the shriek 
of railways, noise and bustle, the bright green eyes of 
drug stores, red brick blocks — this is Steubenville's Main 
Street. Off the Main Street is the Secretary's office of the 
Steelworkers' Committee. Here the strike flowed above 
ground. Posters were hung in public places of Steu- 
benville saying Mother Jones was going to speak. I felt 
that I had come back from Pennsylvania to America; the 
terror was lifted. In the organizer's office a union painter 
was asking for permission to keep his contract. 

"If I don't keep my contract, the chimneys will rust." 

It is strange to see life ebb out of the industry when 
the men flowed out of the mills by the Ohio River. The 
fires were banked; the industry was dead. In Fallonsby, 
Mingo, down into Wheeling and Bellaires, and the sur- 
rounding towns, there were only dead furnaces, empty 
mills, dark towns. Already the furnaces looked extinct. 
They looked as though they had been deserted for years. 

I asked the Steubenville organizer: "What do you do to 
keep alive the enthusiasm among the men?" 

"We don't have to do anything," he answered. "The 
men walked out and they stay out." 



102 Men and Steel 

Meeting in Mingo 

The meeting was in Mingo, the meagerest of steel towns. 
The mills, the workers — that is all. The meeting was in 
the town hall, a rickety building. We rode there in a 
bumping jitney around sharp curves, following the road 
which had been carved on the hillside above the river. 
Below is the dark bulk of the mills, whose black chimneys 
have been eaten by rust. 

Mother Jones stood on a raised platform in the middle 
of the room. The hall was crowded with steel workers. 
Most of them stood. A few sat on benches. They crowded 
up to the platform. They stood there with upturned faces 
full of a mute devotion. 

She is their mother in truth. She is the mother of the 
revolt in their souls. The hall was full of men who could 
not understand her words. What difference does it make 
what words she used? They understood her anger. Her 
defiance and her fearlessness they understood too. Their 
lack of knowledge of her words stripped her meaning to 
the fiery essentials. 

It seemed wonderful to hear her say without police inter- 
ference what she wanted to say. It was a great satisfac- 
tion to see a labor meeting in a town hall. 

There was a ripple of uneasiness. Slips of paper were 
being passed from hand to hand. Something had hap- 
pened. I went to the secretary through the crowd. He 
shoved a roll of leaflets in my hand. The leaflets were an 



Dark Towns 103 

appeal to the workers to protest against the blockade of 
Russia. 

"Lucky I saw that/' he said. "Lucky I got 'em in time. 
Can't have things like that circulated here." 

Above our heads Mother Jones was talking about Free- 
dom and the solidarity of the workers. 

"Why riot?" I asked. 

He looked at me despairingly. He was frightened. 

"Why, they'd take it back to the Polish Priest! We'd 
have the state troops down on us in no time. They'd call 
us Bolsheviks!" 

Mother Jones stopped speaking. Applause broke out. 
She plowed through the crowd to us. She read the leaflet. 

"Well, what's the matter with it?" she asked. "Can't 
you protest about the blockading of women and children?" 

The organizer pleaded with her. "You don't know what 
it's like here. I'm afraid they'll stamp us out." She 
snatched the word from him. 

"Afraid? There's only one thing you should be afraid 
of — of not being a man !" 



104 Men and Steel 

Weirton 

Perhaps Mother Jones was too harsh to the organizer. 
The next day I heard from him that terror sniffs greedily 
on the outskirts of Steubenville. In Pennsylvania terror 
walks openly around. The strike flows underground. In 
Ohio the strike walks openly on the streets. Terror lurks 
out of sight. But it does not flow underground everywhere 
in Ohio. The organizer of Steubenville told me about the 
town of Weirton. This town is not incorporated. It has 
no charter. It belongs to a steel company. He gave me 
some affidavits of steel workers. 

"Read these and you will see why I acted like I did 
last night/' he said. "They searched the workers' houses. 
If they found any Socialist literature they railroaded them 
out of town. They took them out of bed at night. It made 
no difference that they owned their houses. It made no 
difference that their children were there. If we speak of 
Russia they holler 'Revolution' and will call in the troops 
on us." 

Ohio and Pennsylvania are not much different after all. 
It was a matter of degree. 

Thought had become socially perilous in both states. 
For all steel workers it was perilous to have socialistic 
opinions. Working people on strike had been forbidden to 
think together about starving and blockaded Russia. Their 
thoughts had been blockaded. It was dangerous for them 
to ask, "Why should we starve Russian children?" 



Dark Towns 105 

Pensions 

In the steel towns of Allegheny County, for all their foul 
slums, the brick houses shoulder each other in friendly 
fashion and there is fellowship in the welter of life which 
pours through the courts and alleys. But the smaller steel 
towns on the Ohio River are God-forgotten. The flavor 
of life there is that of stale hopelessness. The houses are 
down-at-the-heels. The streets are deep in mud. I walked 
down the streets of such a town with the organizer. 

"I want to stop in/' he said, "and see an old fellow. 
He's scabbing, but he can't help it." 

The mills here made a pretense of work. The "white 
collar crew" and the foremen kept the furnaces alive. 
There were, too, a few "loyal men." 

"This old fellow," said the organizer, "he feels so bad 
at what he's doing, I drop in just to cheer him up. He's 
an old union man. He belonged to the Sons of Vulcan 
he was an Amalgamated man. He's within six months of 
getting his pension. He comes to me and he says, 'Son, 
I've been a union man all my life. What'll I do? My 
pension's six months off.' I said to him, 'Pa, you keep 
right on working.' It wasn't regular of me, but it didn't 
seem right to ask him to give up everything he had. One 
of his sons was killed in the steel works. His other one's 
got a parcel of children. He and his old woman are count- 
ing on the pension." 

We picked our way through the mud and stopped by a 
meager frame house. One of the shutters hung awry in a 



106 Men and Steel 

dismal fashion. The house was not more dilapidated than 
its neighbors. All the houses in this row had something 
wrong. We went inside. An old man sat listlessly by 
the window. 

"Howdy/' he said. 

"How are yon, John?" said the organizer. 

"So so/' he answered without looking up. 

"How are you, Ma?" 

"Oh, I'm fair/' the old woman answered, her anxious 
eyes on the organizer's face. 

The talk lagged. There was no light in that house. It 
was as if some unseen thing. lay dead amongst us. The 
thing that was dead was the man's pride in himself. We 
rose to go. The old man bade us a listless good-by. He 
did not look at us. His wife followed us to the door. 

"His heart's broke," she said. "He can't rest. He talks 
in his sleep that he's a scab." 

Tamo Daleko 

In Steubenville is a Serbian colony crowded in wooden 
houses near the mills. These houses have the slack, neg- 
lected air of steel town houses. Humanity bursts out from 
their doors. But the great Serbian holiday, Kossova day, 
was celebrated in this town. In this town the Serbs also 
celebrate the day which their families embraced Chris- 
tianity. On such a day they give a Slava — a great feast. 
The memory of their oppression by the Turks is fresh. 
Their national independence is recent. Their age-long 
fight against the Turks lives in their songs. 



Dark Towns 107 

I stood waiting to cross the noisy street. Trucks slam- 
banged past. The engine on the railway overhead hooted. 
A man beside me was whistling. He was whistling Tamo 
Daleko, the song which the Serbs sang in exile. After the 
great defeat in 1915 by the Austrians they retreated over 
the Ibar Pass, they went over the Albanian hills. They 
went to Corfu. They reconstructed their regiments and 
when every one thought Serbia dead, Serbian regiments 
reappeared on the Bulgarian front. Tamo Daleko was the 
song for a defeated nation. But the Serbs sang it when 
they marched to victory. 

"Where did you learn that song?" I asked him. 

"In Corfu. My father was a Serb in the Banat. When 
war come I go home. I march on the great retreat." 

"How did you get back here?" I asked him. 

"I get wounded on Monaster front. I am American citi- 
zen. They send me home from France." 

"Are you striking?" I asked him. 

The jam of the street loosened up. He strode on ahead. 
He threw at me over his shoulder, 

"Sure I strike." 

From his abundant gayety he turned to wave at me and 
went off singing to win the strike. His smile had the 
assurance of victory. 

He made me understand the strike. The brothers of 
these men working in the steel mills had overthrown Czar 
and Austrian Kaiser. In America they fought Gary. 



108 Men and Steel 

Johnstown 

Here and there on the Ohio River some mill was flying a 
smoke streamer. Some towns on Monongahela did not 
strike. But Youngstown was dark as a pocket and Johns- 
town was shut down flat. Johnstown lies in a cup of hills. 
The Cambria Steel Company is the core of the town. From 
the railway station I looked down into the yards. Rust 
was over all. Piles of scrap covered with rust, mounds of 
billets covered with rust, carloads of pig-iron covered with 
rust. Paint scaling from black chimneys. Rust crawling 
up chimneys. In this yard nothing stirred. There was no 
sign of life. 

A man walked slowly through the empty yard. It was 
startling to see anything move through that quiet place, 
through the mounds of iron on which rust had fallen like 
a red snow. It seemed the graveyard of industry. Johns- 
town's men had left the mills in rust and silence. Around 
the mills crowded wooden houses, desolate and blackened 
by years of falling soot. 

The main street is noisy. The stores are full of cheap, 
bright colored things; stores with violent colored clothing, 
stores with shiny furniture. Windows full of enamel 
kitchen ware. All the things the workers' wives want, 
shiny and new. Up and down walked groups of idle steel 
workers, big men drifting on the slack tide of idleness into 
the hall of their headquarters. Cambria Steel shut down. 
For eight weeks nothing moving and nothing making, and 



Dark Towns 109 

for eight weeks the encroaching rust thickening on the 
billets, crawling stealthily up the black chimneys. 

During the first week in November a quarter of a million 
steel workers were still on strike. There was power and 
discipline in the self-control and quiet of the strikers. The 
roots of the strike went deep. 



CHAPTER XII 

SILENCE 

The Miner's Son 

FROM Wheeling and the other dark towns in West 
Virginia, and Ohio, I traveled back to Pennsyl- 
vania, a rangy, blunt featured lad for seat com- 
panion. I judged him to be about nineteen. We talked. 

"I'd been visiting my folks in West Virginia," he said. 
"My Paw's a miner." 

"Is he on strike?" I asked. 

"Ahaw," the boy answered. 

"There's been trouble in your part of the country." 

"There's been trouble, but they won't touch Paw, for 
he's just staying home. They're all staying home." 

"What do you do ?" I asked. 

"A steel worker." 

"Where?" 

"In the Edgar Thompson mills in Braddock." 

"You're on strike too, then?" 

He looked away. "There ain't any strike in our mill." 

"Why did you go home?" 

"Oh, work was slack. It was a good time to go." 

"Work was slack because of the strike." 

110 



Silence 111 

"Aw, it's nothing but a Hunky strike. The Hunkies 
walked out. They don't know what they want. They 
don't know what they're striking for. It's all over now, 
anyhow/' he hurried on. 

We were traveling along the Ohio River. The air was 
clear of smoke, the mills' fires were banked. The strike 
was flung across the country. 

"It never was nothing but a Hunky strike," the boy per- 
sisted into my silence. 

"You were never a union man?" 

"No," he said. "You don't get on if you join the union." 

"What does your father think about your scabbing?" 

He looked away again. He shuffled uneasily. 

"Paw — he don't know about it. I never told him there 
was a strike to our mill — and there ain't now any more." 

I thought about this boy a great deal. Thousands of 
workers were still striking in Braddock. They didn't exist 
for him. They were Hunkies. This strike was a mass 
movement. It was a rank and file strike. 

Youngstown was dark. Johnstown Mills were rusted, 
Wheeling was closed and Steubenville idle. The strike 
held in South Chicago. Messages came from the striking 
steel workers in Alabama and Colorado. But this boy 
who worked in the Edgar Thompson Mills didn't admit 
that the strike existed. He had been told that it "was 
over for all but a handful of Hunkies," by the bosses and 
by all the newspapers he saw. 

So he went around carrying word that the strike was 
over. He believed it. He had to. Since his father was 



112 Men and Steel 

a union man he could not have felt it right to scab even on 
Hunkies. 

So he believed the strike was over as the people out in 
the world believed it. 

The Americans in the steel mills are skilled workers. 
They stayed aloof. They minimized the strike. They 
called it off in their own minds. They helped the silence. 

A Slavish organizer said to me bitterly: 

"They are too proud to strike with Hunkies. They're 
not too proud to scab with negroes." 



The Smothered Strike 

It was through this boy's talk that the knowledge began 
to seep in on me of how powerful a weapon silence is. 

Silence ebbed up around the strikers in a stealthy smoth- 
ering tide. People outside thought the strike was broken. 

A labor man from San Francisco stopped over to see 
Foster. 

"You're winding up the strike now, aren't you ?" he said. 

That is what the labor people thought in San Francisco. 
News didn't get out. Silence covered everything. Sup- 
pression and silence like a cloud had settled down over the 
strike area. The papers had called off the strike in saying 
that the strike was over. The fight of these men still on 
strike didn't exist. From the outside the strike appeared 
dark as the towns. The public thought it was over. The 
only news of it appeared in obscure corners of financial 



! 



Silence 113 

columns. Hidden away from the ordinary reader was the 
news that steel was not being made. 

In those days one went out of the strike area from an 
atmosphere of hope to one of unbelief and depression. In 
Pittsburg it was hard to realize how stifling was the 
silence that surrounded the strike. 

From visiting the dark towns I went to New York. 
In New York I had dinner with some labor sympathizers. 

"Too bad the steel strike is going so badly/' they said. 

With some editors friendly to organized labor I talked 
about some articles. They thought the strike was a dead 
issue. Workers, editors, men who sympathized with labor, 
thought the strike was over. 

I had come from the dark towns. I had seen close to 
the patient fabric of the strike. But what I had seen was 
locked within me. There was no means of telling it to 
any one. 

What Everybody Knew 

Before the strike began every one in America knew two 
things about the steel workers. 

One was they were rich. Fabulously rich. They got 
fifty dollars a day. They all lived in steam-heated cottages 
with hot and cold running water. 

The papers said so. 

The farmers envied the steel workers. I found this out 
when I went to visit my own family. 

"What are the steel workers striking about?" they 
wanted to know. "They've got everything they need. 



114 Men and Steel 

They're better off than we." My family thought that most 
steel workers rode to work in their own cars. They thought 
that all steel workers' wives wore fur coats. 

Every one knew that Foster was "red." There was an 
idea current that Foster had led out the contented steel 
workers on strike. He had led them out by hundreds of 
thousands. They would have been all right if he had let 
them alone. 

Every one condemned the strike leadership. 

Now every one thought that the strike of the steel 
workers was over. 

The papers said so. 

A good thing too. 

To all the public of America nothing of the strikers' 
struggle or their reason for striking penetrated. The steel 
workers shouted out to the world for understanding, but it 
was as though they cried inside a vacuum. No one heard. 
No one knew what had happened. No one knew what these 
three hundred thousand men had struck for. No one 
knew the strike was still on. 

English Workers 

Sometimes it seemed like a joke on the public. What 
becomes of "democratic public opinion" when the steel 
masters do the publicity? And without this public opinion 
how are we to settle our disputes? 

Silence was a strange work of hate to visit on the men 
who made wealth for the country, whose only crime was 



Silence 115 

to ask for conditions which the government gives its em- 
ployees, the conditions which England's steel workers have 
long since had. The English steel workers sent this cable 
to the steel workers of America: 

"On behalf of the one hundred and fifty thousand British 
Iron and Steel Workers who already enjoy all and more 
than you are asking for and who through joint representa- 
tion of employers and workmen's organizations have the 
most successful machinery of industrial negotiations in the 
world, we send warmest wishes for the success of your 
fight on behalf of the workers in American Iron and Steel 
industry. By the refusal of the representatives of the Steel 
Corporation to submit dispute to arbitration, the corpora- 
tion stands condemned." 

During the beginning of the American steel strike, the 
railway workers of England struck also. I had a letter 
from England which described what happened in England. 
A great building was turned into publicity headquarters. 
An army of voluntary workers got together to explain to 
all England what the strike was about; Masters of Balliol 
and Dons of Cambridge writing for the strike, explaining, 
bringing light, telling the people what it was about, cre- 
ating understanding. Artists and writers of England, 
economists and journalists, all working with the railway 
men, striving to create understanding between them and 
the public. 

Between the steel workers of this country and such 
understanding stood the United States Steel Corporation, 
whose most powerful weapon was this deadening silence. 



116 Men and Steel 

For days the only news of the steel strike that was carried, 
and it was carried in headlines, was that a bomb plot had 
been unearthed in Gary, and that the authorities knew who 
the authors of the plot were. The news of this plot died. 
It had no sequel. No one was arrested. There was no 
bomb plot. But in the mind of the public there remained 
the belief that the steel workers were dangerous people. 
Dangerous and rich! 

The Publicity Department 

The link between the steel strikers and the public was 
the Publicity Director of the Steel Strike. This was the 
grand sounding name that they gave Edwin Newdick. One 
would suppose he had a staff working under him. He had 
no staff. He was the Publicity Department. If he ever 
had help it was casual and voluntary. 

Edwin Newdick gave the news out to the papers. He 
saw the reporters. Every day news from the striking 
towns streamed in. Secretaries wrote letters telling the 
news. The news was digested, rewritten, sent out. There 
was one stenographer to help. At first even the mimeo- 
graphing was done in the office. The Publicity Director 
and any one who chose to, ground off mimeographed copies 
of the news until the lights went out. 

The Publicity Director also had the morale of the strike 
as his care. Strike bulletins went out three times a week. 
They were translated into six languages. All these things, 
the news for the public, the news for the labor papers, the 



Silence 117 

news for the secretaries and organizers, the bulletins 
addressing the strikers, the Publicity Director did them all. 
The immense strike and this one man to get news back and 
forth. It could not have been otherwise. The money had 
to be spent for bread for the workers. 

Few friendly writers came to report the strike, but there 
were many hostile ones. The big publicity department of 
the United States Steel Corporation did its work thor- 
oughly and did its work well. 

The Letter From Alabama 

The Publicity Department sent information to isolated 
people who wrote in for news. There was not money 
enough nor men enough to distribute the news to all the 
strikers. Every day people wrote to ask for news. Every 
day letters came like that of the boy in Alabama: 

"I am Still In Doubt about the Steel Strike Situation. 

"Is the Strike Still on ore has It Been called off. 

"I Dont Beleive the Lying News Papers. 

"If the Strike is over I Want to come North and get 
away from this yellow Bunch of Scabs. 

"I was Working in the Carp Dept. of T. C. I. R. R. Co. 
and about 95 Percent of Carman and Helpers come out. 
But the Ensley Steel Mill never Lost 15 minutes on ac- 
count of Strike. All the men that come out on Strike in 
the Car Dept. that had 4 years Experience got good jobs 
on the Railroads without any trouble. 

"But the Helpers are the unfortunate ones. 



118 Men and Steel 

"I had 3 years experience and the Foremans on these 
main Lines Said I would have to Start all over again 
Before I could get a Rate. 

"And I don't think It is Right. Besides I could Not 
Live on 29c. a hr. Just such things as that is Driving a 
Lot of men Back to the U. S. Steel Corporation for Em- 
ployment. 

"if the B. R. C. of A. cared to Help the Steel Strikers 
they would manage some way to Put these Carman Helpers 
to Work Without Loseing their age. U. S. Steel Corpora- 
tion put my Mother out of one of their houses that She 
had been Living in for 14 years Because me and my 
Brother Struck and If there is any Way that I can keep 
from faceing them Dogs and telling them I am Sorry I 
did Not Scab on for them, I don't Want to do It. they 
oun Every thing around here that is Worth owning and If 
I Don't get a job With the union Railroads Soon I am 
going to have to face them or Lose Everything I got in 
my house. Well I will close. Any Information you can 
give me will Be appreciated." 

All the strike was in that letter. There were men like 
this everywhere, men who faced ruin, men who wouldn't 
scab, men so isolated that they didn't know whether the 
strike was called off or not. It showed, too, that their 
greatest enemy was silence. It was worse than violence. 
It was worse than white terror. 



Silence 119 

Espionage 

Some of the Americans struck even in Allegheny County. 
I knew the wife of one, a roller. He was an Irish- 
American like herself. They had a pretty home, a flat 
that had nice painted floors with improvements. They 
had a piano. 

"We'll have to move from here/' she said. "They'll 
never take him back after the strike. He'll be blacklisted. 
You don't know what they make you suffer for being a 
union man in a town like this if you're an American. Oh, 
it's awful to live amongst spies ! They talk about the Cos- 
sacks, but it's the spies that's bad. Tim never knows who's 
a friend. There is some one always watching. There's 
some one always trying to ferret out if a fellow holds a 
union card. I'll be glad to go. I'll be glad to live any- 
where where I'm not spied on. When any one comes to 
see him, we never know whether he's a friend or if he's 
come to worm something out of Tim. I tell you it's an 
awful way to live when you don't know who your friends 
are. It's an awful way to live when people come friendly 
like, only to squeal on you. They found Tim out. They 
fired him. That was before the strike. He was helping 
in the organizing campaign. Then they tried to get him 
back. He wouldn't go. There's women afraid to be seen 
talking to me — because my husband's a Union man. They're 
afraid a spotter '11 see us talking together. There's a free 
country for you! I tell you there's no such thing for a 
Union man in the steel towns." 



CHAPTER XIII 

COMMISSARY 

Polish Strikers 

FOR five weeks the strikers had nothing. They had 
been eating their skins. They lived on their sav- 
ings. Some who had no savings existed from hand 
to mouth. Sometimes they picked up a chance bit of work, 
sometimes they were helped by their friends. 

Then commissary stores were formed. Every strike 
town had such a store. Here strikers who needed it could 
come for groceries. The groceries were not for every one. 
There was not money enough to feed 250,000 strikers and 
their families. A narrow line had to be drawn between 
those actually in want and those nearly in want. When a 
striker applied for relief, one of the strike committee went 
around to talk the matter Over with the family. I went 
around Pittsburg with a Polish steel worker making such 
visits of investigation. 

It was not easy to find the places where the strikers 
lived. We went down black alleys, we passed refuse dumps 
that looked as though they had always been there. Layer 
on layer of refuse lay packed and rotting. The refuse 
dumps looked contemporaneous with a scaling, dilapidated 

ro 



Commissary 121 

meeting house, which in its undignified old age had become 
a storehouse. It was falling to pieces. The paint had 
scaled from its pillars. Everything in that neighborhood 
was falling to pieces. This corner of Pittsburg told 
Pittsburg's history. The mild red brick of the houses had 
been blackened with the Pittsburg smoke. When these 
old-time inhabitants had gone to church in the meeting 
house, well-to-do comfortable families then lived a family 
in a house. Now a family lived in almost every room. 

We found the house we were looking for. We had to 
bend down to get in because laundry was hanging thick 
in the front hall. We went down a flight of stairs which 
led to a back yard. The yard was bricked over and littered 
with debris. It was separated from the other yards by 
high blackened wooden palings. A stinking privy stood 
in one corner. The yard was as cheerful as a well, but 
the children played here. 

We went into a room giving flush on the yard. It was 
clean and bleak. On each side of the stove were two chairs 
without backs. There was a table. A mechanical cradle 
rocked a baby to and fro — tick-tack, tick-tack. There were 
two other chairs in the room. That was all. There were 
curtains at the window that were patched and darned, and 
in spite of the invading grime, they were white. 

The woman called her husband from an inner room. 
The room in which we stood had been the kitchen in the 
old days when this had been a private house. The room 
from which her husband came had been the coal cellar. 
It had no ventilation. Here in this cellar they slept — 



122 Men and Steel 

they and their four children. In some steel workers' houses 
are the evidences of better wages, a comfortable sofa, a 
sewing machine, a new stove. Here there was no sign of 
such well-being. Bare walls and emptiness — that was all. 
Babies coming in such rapid succession had eaten up all 
this man could earn. 

For a while they talked together in Polish. The con- 
versation between the member of the strike committee and 
the man and his wife was earnest. They never smiled. 
Through it all ran the rippling laughter of the children. 
These people had brought with them such sound blood that 
their children were gay and bonny and full of laughter. 
They were three, four, and five years old. There was a 
baby of eleven months. 

"They've decided/' said my guide, "that they could wait 
three weeks more before they come to the commissary." 

They had nothing and they could wait three weeks more. 
The endurance of women was a bulwark of the steel strike. 
Women like this, young and burdened down by the cares of 
their children, upheld it. Women who live without diver- 
sion, isolated by poverty from all that is beautiful in life, 
women whose eyes rest on nothing that is fair except the 
faces of their children, sacrificed for the strike. There 
were hundreds of women and thousands of them scattered 
through the steel towns who made up their minds that they 
could hold out a little longer, another week, two weeks 
more. One remembered them when one saw the commis- 
sary at work. 



Commissary 123 

The Strike Woman 

During this time I went with Father Kazinci to see one 
of his parishioners. 

"That woman," he said, "should go to the Commissary. 
She's too tired to work as she does." 

As the door opened a smell of suds enveloped us. 
The room was full of clothes. I have no memory of the 
furniture of the house. The tubs of water, the baskets 
of clothes, the heavy men's clothes drying on the line, 
hid everything else. On the floor there were puddles of 
water. More clothes were boiling on the stove. 

You could not tell if the woman who had answered the 
door was young or old. She was tired even beyond em- 
barrassment. Her dress was slopped with water and her 
hair was wet from the steaming tub which she had just 
left. 

"Excuse, Father," she said. "The pails are so heavy 
when I come from the court I spill some always." 

"Haven't you gone to the Commissary?" 

"Not yet, Father." 

"Are you going?" 

"Not yet, Father. I wash for boarders." 

"How many boarders?" 

"Four. They sleep upstairs; me down." 

The baby woke up and began to cry. She hushed it 
mechanically. 

"It's too much for you, so many boarders," Father 
Kazinci said. 



124 Men and Steel 

"How shall I live through the strike without boarders?" 
she asked him, hushing the baby on her damp shoulder. 
"It's always so; it's always strike. Without boarders how 
shall I live since I come to this country ? I come nine years 
ago. There is a strike in New York. By and by they 
lose. My husband get a letter from a friend. He says 
there is work in the mines. We go to the mines. Not 
far from here, Father, that was. There come a strike 
right away." 

"You've been in strikes almost all the time." 

"Yes." 

"How did you get on ?" 

She deserted the difficult English for her own language. 
Finding some consolation in his mute sympathy, she talked 
on monotonously. She was without protest as she sat and 
told of one strike after another, of bearing children and 
losing them, as one might speak of storms at sea. Strikes 
seemed to her normal. Strikes had followed her for nine 
years in her wanderings around America. She seemed like 
a stupid woman. She had the uncomplaining quality of a 
tired beast of burden. 

I said to her, "I should think you would be tired of 
strikes." 

Suddenly from her depths there flamed out at me. her 
inner conviction. "If we don't strike what will happen to 
our children? It will always be the same for us working 
people if we do not keep together !" 



Co mm issary 125 

Commissary in Braddock 

In every striking steel town there was a headquarters 
where the people came for their strike rations. Any child 
on the street could tell you where the Commissary was. 
In Braddock the Commissary was in the basement of the 
parochial school which was built by Father Kazinci. Men 
passed, big parcels of food in their arms. Two children 
were tugging their basket up a narrow basement stairs. 
Groups of people were standing around. The basement 
was crowded. In the middle stood counters made of boards 
and trestles. All around barrels of potatoes, pyramids of 
canned goods. The smell of coffee was in the air; piles 
of good bread ready to be given out. Two men were 
weighing out the rations of potatoes; ten pounds for half 
a week for a family of six. 

A low buzz of conversation filled the place. Two boys 
and their father packed up their food. Others stood 
patiently waiting their turn. It was a long line; Central 
Europe packed together, Pole, Slovak, Croat, Roumanian, 
Italian. All could have gone back to work had they chosen ; 
there was no picket line in Braddock to shame them. There 
was everything to drive them back. Almost all of these 
men had large families. 

Sometimes you see children with the pinched look of 
the starved Austrian children. I asked one boy how old 
he was. He answered, fifteen. He looked about twelve. 

"We have six other children in our family, not counting 
the new baby." 



126 Men and Steel 

There were plenty of new babies born during the strike. 
Many women faced having a new baby with nothing but 
the Commissary between them and starvation. There were 
so many young babies that a special milk fund was raised 
in Pittsburg so that the strike babies might be looked 
after. 

I saw Gent, the local secretary, talking with one of the 
men. The man thought a moment, and then put back 
some of his rations. In Braddock and in many other 
towns the Commissary had over one-third more for people 
than had been planned. Those who had smaller families 
were asked to take only exactly what they needed. So 
with sacrifices piled on sacrifices the people were fed, the 
Commissary line grew. I watched them file past, pack 
their rations of potatoes, bread, beans, bacon, coffee, milk 
and sirup, leaving some behind when they could. 

A woman with sharp shining eyes came up. She began 
wheedling for an extra can of tomatoes. Her voice had an 
indescribable mixture of mockery and impudence. She was 
a Gypsy woman unmistakably. 

"She'd make off with an extra can of tomatoes behind 
your back," the organizer said, as she threw back some 
laughing mockery over her shoulder. "But there's one 
thing those folks don't do — they don't scab." 



Commissary 127 

Strike Relief Money 

The money for this food came from all over America. 
Some was contributed by the Internationals, but as the 
rank and file were the backbone of the strike, so the rank 
and file of labor supported the steel workers' commissary 
stores. Small unions in obscure towns voted the pay of a 
day's work to the steel workers. Working women sent 
in small sums. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of 
America gave one hundred thousand dollars. This is an 
organization outside of the American Federation of Labor. 
When the receipt was sent from Washington headquarters 
of the A. F. of L. no letter of thanks was received from 
the Washington officials. 

The steel strike, which extended over such a great area, 
now flowed out further and bound together the workers 
of North and South. It was a great work to feed so many 
workers. This money was contributed by individual sac- 
rifices. 



128 Men and Steel 

Meaning of the Strike 

The Commissary in Braddock was over for the day. I 
sat with Father Kazinci in his living room. The room is 
oval. In one end a platform is raised up two steps above 
the room. From this eminence the Fathers sit and look 
over Braddock. The hill descends sharply from this point; 
St. Michael's Church is below, then Main Street. Beyond 
that the mill chimneys with their heavy crown of coiling 
smoke and the squalor of the first ward. Further the 
sudden river bank, almost as red as the mounds of red 
ore in the mill yards. 

We sat a while in quiet. Father Kazinci spoke : 

"How do they do it?" he wondered. He spoke imper- 
sonally, as though to himself. "What gives them their 
fortitude? All these men we saw to-day are doing some- 
thing cruelly difficult, something which takes the highest 
courage. They stay out and see negro strike-breakers take 
their jobs. Think what sacrifice every day means, what 
desperate resistance. These people have given up their 
income voluntarily. They have risked their jobs, their 
only source of income. 

"Our people have laid by money in the bank. They 
are not gamblers with chance like Americans. The future 
is a vivid thing to them. They fear old age, they fear 
sickness, they know that lockouts come. They know the 
mills shut down. They insure against these things by pain- 
ful savings. They never touch that sacred insurance fund 
against disaster ; it is inviolate. They are now using these 



Commissary 129 

savings, the fruit of their self-denial. They are pouring 
the money out; they are pouring it out on the altar of 
liberty — liberty to join their own unions, freedom from the 
twelve-hour day. Think of them — hundreds and thousands 
of them making these sacrifices together. People have to 
think a cause just to do such things. They have to believe 
in it with all their hearts. They have to have courage. 
It takes courage for a single man to do this. Think what 
it means for men with children. Think what it means for 
women to stand back of their men. I go among my people. 
I see them holding out. I wonder how they do it. I won- 
der at the force within me. 

"But they're striking for a better life for their children. 
They're through with espionage that boycotts union men. 
They want to put an end to this dehumanizing double shift. 
Why, do you know, a Braddock mill superintendent 
stopped one of my people on the street the other day. He 
was an old-timer, a faithful worker. The mill superin- 
tendent was surprised to see him idle. 

" 'Aren't you working?' he asked. 

" 'No, I'm not working.' 

" 'Why not?' 

' 'I'm on strike; I'm taking a holiday. I'm paying my- 
self back those twenty Christmases I worked for the com- 
pany.' 

"But even such things don't explain their courage. I 
tell you the history of this steel strike is the history of the 
endurance of men and women." 



CHAPTER XIV 

ANONYMOUS PEOPLE 

The Strike Baby 

ANONYMOUS people like these women willing to 
wait for the Commissary made the backbone of the 
strike. There were plenty who were cowards at 
heart. There were plenty who were waiting to sneak back. 
Not all people were unselfish about the Commissary, plenty 
of strikers were willing to take all they could get. 

The courageous minority stiffened the morale of the 
wavering ones. They were to be found everywhere. 

Through making visits with Father Kazinci I got to 
know what sort of people carried the strike on their backs. 
These were people like Yanski and his wife. 

There was a door in the first ward that I often noticed. 
Its inner panels were green as spring, with a border vivid 
Tusset. It was the most hopeful thing in that drab neigh- 
borhood, a signal to the world — "Happy people live here." 

Everything in this house matched that painted door, 
beginning with the woman who opened it. The walls had 
been freshly painted. The holy pictures made violent 
splashes of red against the new paint. In the back room 
was a bed of majestic size. I never saw such a magnificent 

130 



Anonymous People 131 

bed. It was shining brass. It had crocheted coverings. 
The coverings were lined with bright blue. There was 
blue ribbon on the pillows, and they were covered with 
embroidered pillow shams. Beside the bed was a cradle. 
This, too, was beribboned, and in it lay a very little baby. 

"That baby," the woman explained, "is the strike baby. 
The strike was a fine time for me to have a baby. Yanski 
is home. You see, Father, it was like this. The strike is 
a bad time; it is a bad thing that a man shall not be at 
work and that he shall spend his money so he may get his 
rights. Yanski and I talked it up. 'They talk of the 
strike/ he said. 'What do you think?' 'Strike/ I said. 
'Go out with the men.' I read the demands. They were 
good demands." 

"Do most of the women read the demands?" I asked. 

She said: "When your man goes out on strike you wish 
to know what for. When your man goes out and is not 
earning money any more you would be a fool if you didn't 
wish to know what gain there is in it for him and yourself. 
Well, we talked it up. Yanski said, 'When have I had a 
rest? Never. We will have a good time this strike/ So 
we did. He painted everything. He made the cradle; he 
made that beautiful chest of drawers from old packing 
boxes. He stained and polished it. And when the baby 
was born, what a help ! For Yanski is handy in the house 
— not like some men." 

Yanski came in, a comical looking fellow, with high 
cheek bones and small beady eyes. From the way he and 
his wife talked I knew that they enjoyed life together. 



132 Men and Steel 

The atmosphere of holiday was still around them. Yanski 
had painted the door and made the cradle and made tlie 
chest of drawers, and had had fun for once. There was 
in that home life, young energy, wholesome enjoyment. 
It made you feel as good to be with Yanski and his wife 
as being with happy children. 

We asked a question which Father Kazinci often puts. 
"Do you ever think of going into the country to live?" 
"We're saving to go/' Yanski said. "We want to live 
where there are green fields/' 

Old Country Children 

Next door to Yanski lived a handsome woman who had 
the high vitality that makes the Anglo-Saxon, in compari- 
son, seem meager. She was spending her passion on the 
desire to go back home. She had four boys. They were 
dark-skinned and blue-eyed and wide-faced. They rushed 
in and out as if the store of energy pent within them was 
so great that they could rush through a lifetime like that 
without even being tired. 

"These are my Old Country boys," she told me, "all 
born over there, all born in my home." 

There seemed to be some special virtue to these boys 
in her eyes as though through them she had brought part 
of her home with her. 

"You want to go back?" I asked her. 

"Want to go back!" she echoed. "I would rather die 
on a dunghill there than in a palace here." 



Anonymous People 133 

I did not get to the bottom of her fury. It went so deep 
in her that she spoke with disparagement of the three chil- 
dren born here. She openly and passionately preferred 
her "Old Country boys. ,, In answer to my question as to 
why she so preferred the Old Country, she flung at me: 

"There, there is life!" She threw her arms out in a 
wide gesture. 

The year before I had seen the people of Hungary 
stream out in the holiday of Fingsten — the holiday of sum- 
mer, which dates from some pagan festival. Even under 
the pressure of war, the spirit of life there had remained 
opulent. A pleasure-loving spirit was abroad. All of 
youth had streamed out of the villages to greet summer. 
The young women looked like magnificent full grown 
flowers, the older women like ripe fruit, for they age in a 
mellow, generous fashion. I took it that this woman lashed 
our country with the fury of her scorn because her eyes 
rested on smoke and ugliness, and there was no holiday 
of summer. She was a woman who looked as though she 
should have lived in a peony garden; instead she lived in 
a Braddock courtyard, where it seemed to be uncertain 
whether the garbage would be removed this year or next. 
Yet her indignant fury must have had a deeper reason. 

Now she was using this fury in going on strike with 
her husband. He was a handsome, easy going fellow. 
You felt she did his anger for him. 



134 Men and Steel 

The Contented Woman 

In the midst of this discontent I came across unques- 
tioning women, who had brought with them from their 
lands a deeper acceptance of life than any we know. They 
were the product of calmer days and of horizons not bound 
by friezes of mill chimneys. I have never seen any one 
so secure as one of them seemed. Peace lived in her house. 
Her husband was sleeping on a wide davenport, her little 
girl was sitting opposite her playing quietly, the kettle 
hummed, the stove shone. She had the full array of the 
small adornments of life which the women have when they 
can — clean curtains, holy pictures making crimson splashes 
on the wall, a shelf dressed in a linen towel with a deep 
border of crocheted lace, on which stood a crucifix flanked 
by two candles. 

She was a plump, comely woman, dressed in a house 
gown of lavender with a wide apron and a frilled cap on 
her head. Her husband worked at night, and then he 
came home and had his breakfast, and she could watch 
him all day while he slept. Her life was uncomplicated. 
She had only one child, and she was content with a deep 
inner contentment. It shone from her like a light. It 
made one happy to see it. One finds many women here 
who have peace in their eyes. 

Why have they such steadfast tranquillity? It may be 
because the doors of life and death are forever open upon 
them. They do not question either. We ignore birth and 
refuse to admit the thought of death, so we limit life. 



Anonymous People 135 

These two great doors swing forever within their sight. 
Their men work in a perilous occupation, and they them- 
selves go through life, an endless procession of children 
being born to them. Here and there you meet a woman 
submerged in the struggle. For the most part the women 
I saw in the steel towns are adequate. They face life, 
with tranquil assurance. 

But they do not like it here. Nor have they become 
assimilated. They do not learn the language, they do not 
mingle with Americans, and they seem to keep their village 
feeling and their village customs, as far as they can, like 
some sacred guarded flame. 

Rosie's Measles 

Whenever Father Kazinci and I plunged into the welter 
of life of the First Ward, children ran to him. They all 
loved him. One day as we visited from house to house a 
little girl followed us. We would find her still waiting for 
us as we came out of houses. At last she came up with 
desperate boldness. Her eyes on the grimy snow, she 
whispered something. Father Kazinci bent over. 

"I can't hear you, my child. Speak louder. ,, 

With dazzling courage she managed to speak aloud. 
"Will you visit my Mama?" she said. She had followed 
us for blocks to be able to get out these words. It was 
a splendid moral victory. We lost no time in going. 

A young looking woman was waiting in the door. 

"My Rosie, can you beat her? When she sees you, 



136 Men and Steel 

Father, 'I shall get him/ she says. Out she goes like a 
bird flying. I call to her. 'Rosie, come back! You don't 
dare, Rosie V " 

The woman shook with laughter until I felt that her 
house was a warm-hearted place. I knew people have a 
good time when they gather around the table of Rosie's 
young mother. 

She made jokes about everything, this woman. She 
joked about herself and what she said to her husband 
when she went to get him out of the saloon in the times 
before prohibition. Then she made a grim joke that I 
have heard more than once. When Father Kazinci asked 
her: "Are all your children living?" 

"Indeed yes, Father. I have no luck. Every one of 
them alive. You see this child/' she said, "this is my Rosie. 
She has the will of a mule. You can lay her over your 
knee and spank her three times a day and she does what 
she wishes. What does she do when she has the measles? 
When my back is turned she gets up and goes to school, 
because a child who never has been absent from school 
will get a silver bell. She wants to be never absent from 
school. With measles all over her and red as a beet, she 
gets up and goes. And what does she do the rest of the 
time? She sits up in bed watching her measles fade, with 
the little glass that her father shaves by her so that she 
may go back to school." 

There is magic in the Slavic character which had made 
life cheerful even in the face of steel mill and smoke 
barrier. The rubbish of a month was rotting unchecked 



Anonymous People 137 

outside, but Rosie's house inside was shining with color and 
cleanliness. It was a home as sound as good bread. 

Two of the older children came in. They bowed to 
Father Kazinci politely. It was like the old-fashioned 
"making manners. " Then, without being told, they hung 
up their coats and hats. This was a sight in the steel 
workers' families which fascinated me. This woman con- 
fided to me the secret of the children's astounding good- 
ness. 

She threw her hands up. "Ma'am/' she said, "if our 
kids be bad we all go crazy together. In two three rooms 
children's got to be good !" 



138 Men and Steel 

How They Came Here 

The strike is based on the thousands of people like these 
in Braddock. They came to this country seeking a wider 
opportunity. They came to this country to seek freedom. 
Hope brought them here. 

As the pioneer spirit of America slackened and grew 
fat on possessions and prosperity they replenished it with 
their adventurous blood. Their men are strong. Their 
women have the tranquil eyes of those accustomed to look- 
ing over wide fields. Their faces are still brown with 
wind and sun. They brought with them a bright treasure 
of hope and it is buried under the garbage of the streets. 

This young army came here and spilled its youth and 
its strength over the streets of Youngstown, Homestead 
and Braddock. They came here flying the bright banners 
of courage and freedom. 

As one goes about among the women, the two things 
that it hurts most to hear them talk about are their memo- 
ries and their hopes. 

This strike was concerned with these dreams and these 
hopes. In the last analysis a home is what any strike is 
about. This strike concerned the right of organization, 
hours and conditions. Follow these things to their source 
and they will lead you back to a home and a woman sitting 
in it with a child in her arms. This fight for organization 
and hours will take you back from the sinister splendor of 
the mills to a kitchen where children are getting ready 
to go to school. 



PART FOUR 
THE DYING STRIKE 



CHAPTER XV 

THE BREAK 

The Mills Are Pried Open 

UNTIL the second week in November there was 
scarcely a break in the strike. Then disquieting 
rumors began to fly in to the central office in Pitts- 
burg. Marshal law in Gary had been a mighty strike- 
breaker. The soldiers and the bosses had acted together, 
intimidating the workers. Here and there a mill idle for 
five weeks would be pried open. Each mill that was pried 
open stabbed the courage of the workers. The cowards 
went from their own towns, where they were ashamed to 
scab, and scabbed in distant towns. In this way the towns 
exchanged their men without courage. The indifference 
of many of the Internationals played its part. Many of 
the craft unions involved in the manufacture of steel had 
not been anxious to see steel organized. Many craft 
unions have never cared to organize unskilled labor. 

Now happened an amazing thing. The Amalgamated 
Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers had survived 
in the steel towns in independent plants. In these towns 
it still had contracts. Its membership had been increased 
to 100,000 by the strike situation and the National Com- 

141 



142 Men and Steel 

mittee. The officials of the Amalgamated had never organ- 
ized steel. They had not believed steel could be organized. 
They had profited through the organization of steel. Now 
in the fifth week of the strike they declared that they must 
keep their contracts. They protested against mills being 
picketed in which they had contracts. They wanted their 
skilled men to go back to work and keep these contracts. 
They wanted the laborers who had been added to their 
ranks in so many thousands to return with the skilled men. 
It was a blow at the morale of the strike. There was a 
stormy meeting of the National Committee in Pittsburg. 
Organizers of Youngstown and Steuben ville and other 
places where there were contracts protested violently. 
They protested in vain. The contract with the employer 
was more important to the officials of this union than the 
welfare of the strike. 

After the strike was over the Amalgamated, with its new 
members and its swollen treasury, withdraw from the 
National Committee. Its organization refused to have any- 
thing further to do with the Committee which had suc- 
ceeded in organizing 25(1,000 steel workers. At the A. F. 
of L. Convention in Montreal all efforts to urge it to come 
in again were fruitless. The Amalgamated, whose union 
comprised more steel workers than any of the other 
twenty-four Internationals involved in the strike, broke 
up the old National Committee as in the early days of 
November it helped to undermine the strike. 



The Break 143 

Youngstown Office 

After six weeks a red flare startled Youngstown's skies. 
The Ohio works opened up. They had been pried open, 
people said, by negro strike-breakers. Negroes had been 
brought into Youngstown in sealed box cars by night. 
Rumor flew through the town. Everything was going to 
open. Every one was going back to work and the strike 
would be lost. The Americans were trickling back. All 
the papers were saying the mills would be open wide. All 
the strikers read the papers. Every one had been told 
by boss or by tradesman that he alone would be staying 
out. Every blast of the furnace cried to the workers, 
"Come back and work; the strike is over. ,, 

All Sunday the strikers were poised fearfully as though 
upon the brink of disaster. All day one had the sensation 
of being on a jam of logs that was about to break. Panic 
and fear and doubt might do its work among the men. 

Youngstown Office buzzed with the news of the action of 
the Amalgamated. In many places near Youngstown 
plants would be affected. Into a silence a big Irishman 
threw with slow bitterness: 

"I wonder how much they got from the steel companies 
for keeping those contracts. " 

Men came into Strike Headquarters, a steady trickle of 
them. They wanted to see McCadden, they wanted to see 
Hammersmark. They wanted to talk with some one. You 
had the sense of their coming, as they had so often, for 
moral support. They wanted reassurance; they wanted 



144 Men and Steel 

denials that the strike would be called off. Under their 
doubt was stubborn patience. They came to seek courage. 
It gave one courage to see them; they were not men to be 
stampeded. They had fought so long. Yet no one knew 
what would happen. No one could be sure that a mighty 
stream of men would not pour back in the mills. The 
scene was set for it. The setting of the stage was the 
blast works. The opening had been announced by papers 
and by the bosses. 

Picket Line 

I went out to see the disaster. It was not yet five in the 
morning, and black as midnight except where the fiery 
salvos of the blast furnace of the Ohio Works shattered 
the night with glory. I was alone in my ride in the street 
car except for two uneasy scabs. I didn't look at them; 
I didn't like to. The right of the individual workman to 
work when and how he liked seemed as tenable as the 
right of the individual citizen to desert to the enemy in 
wartime. I got out of the car. A man detached himself 
from the darkness. 

"Ma'am, I come to meet you/' he greeted me. 

In silence we went toward the works. 

All the thought of the strikers is focussed on the picket 
line. There goes on daily a terrible and silent contest of 
wills. 

We walked through the darkened streets. A group of 
policemen were on a corner. We exchanged "Good morn- 
ings" as we passed by. Here in Ohio peaceful picketing 



The Break 145 

was legal. The police knew the organizers. Some of the 
deputies were even sympathetic to the strikers. Up the 
side streets stood dark groups of men. I knew that on the 
streets leading down hill toward the works more men 
were posted. They were there to guard the strike. They 
had been there night after night to see that no betrayer 
slipped through to work. 

A man with tools came hurrying along. 

"Were you goings boy?" my guide challenged. 

"Going to work up to Youngstown — I ain't scabbing 
you didn't think I was." He was young and eager. He 
couldn't bear the implications that he was a deserter. 

Another man scuttled through the dark, head down, tool 
box held tight. 

"Were you going, boy?" the challenge came again. 
There was no menace in his deep voice, no note of bullying; 
only a sorrowful and accusing gravity. "Why you going 
to work, boy? Don' you know we're on strike?" The 
man hurried without stopping down the street whose dark- 
ness was now violently torn asunder by the sudden splendid 
fury of the blast. The buildings, the high chimneys and 
walls and bridges, the houses and the knots of men were 
etched black against the magnificent violence of flame. 
The picket line thickened. The men moved up and down 
sluggishly, enough to conform with the law, which advises 
pickets to keep moving. A patrol wagon came past. 
Policemen got out of it near the gate of the mills. Three 
big wagons thundered over the bridge leading to the mill 
gate — provisions for the scabs. 



146 Men and Steel 

A trickle of men began coming over out of the mill. 
They crossed another group coming in. From the point 
of view of the quiet, watching men those were traitors, 
deserters, men of the spawn of Judas. The pickets were 
quiet and watchful. No one spoke. Their scarcely moving 
line gave the impression of a slow drifting stream. The 
men coming and going from work walked swiftly, head 
down, shoulders hunched, hurrying to get out of sight of 
the watchful line with its terrible and accusing quiet. 

Day came creeping on us; we could see each other's 
faces. A light primrose stained the sky which seemed far 
off and remote. When dawn touched the men they looked 
cold and tired ; they looked anxious and worn. The whistle 
gave tongue. More men hurried out of the mill, more men 
scuttled in. The patrol wagon came up ; the police hopped 
in. It was seven o'clock; the morning vigil was over. 
The strike was unbroken. The deluge had not occurred. 
The men weary with watching, weary with inaction and 
with suspense, drifted to their homes. 

Steel Workers 9 Children 

"You're cold, ma'am," my guide said. "I want you 
should come to my house to get breakfast; my house ain't 
far." 

He would not let me go. He couldn't see me get on a 
car without a cup of coffee. We walked past little de- 
tached dwellings, small frame houses, some few of con- 
crete. Here and there a crimson rambler was planted 



The Break 147 

over a door; there were porches, and plots of ground sur- 
rounded the houses. This was Steelton, the most decent 
steel community that I had seen. 

A big boy met us at the gate on his way to school. In- 
side the kitchen stood rows and rows of polished shoes 
ready to put on. Brightly polished shoes standing neatly 
two by two. Any parent will understand what this means. 
Few families can get boys to black their shoes the night 
before. 

The striker's wife greeted me like an old friend. Had 
they gone back, she wanted to know? It wasn't true — 
thank God! Were there more scabs than yesterday? 
Above all, had any of their own people gone back? Was 
there treason in the house? 

The children came in. They went to the sink to finish 
their washing. An older girl, a blonde child with a wide 
placid face, turned the skeptical and disillusioned eye of 
an eider sister upon the backs of the boys' necks. They 
went into the next room and got clean patched shirts. My 
hostess fried eggs for Mike and myself and poured us 
coffee. They talked. The children ate. I have never 
seen such well-behaved children. They did not interrupt 
the conversation. No one cried out, "Ma, where's this — 
Ma, I can't find that." They dressed and ate their break- 
fast and went to school, and before they went they said 
good-by and shook hands with me. 

Mike had been here for twenty years. After twenty 
years of work underground in the mines and in the heat of 
the steel mills, after twenty years of unremitting industry, 



148 Men and Steel 

he had bought a four-room house. It had a grape arbor 
and a little garden. He has eight children. That is 
what the conditions of labor in this country had permitted 
him to achieve. He is incomparably better off than the 
average steel worker. 

Why Men Strike 

The baby came and laid her head against Mike's knee, 
and Tisa, who is still nearly a baby, climbed up and put 
her arms around his neck; he enclosed them in a great 
arm. 

"They only get to know their papa now, since the strike. 
When father works fourteen hours night and ten light, he 
never sees the children." He nodded. 

"You see that's why I struck. How do you think the 
strike go? You think we go in' to win now — pretty soon?" 

His wife broke in: "If this strike ain't won, we're goin' 
to win another strike. Our people ain't never goin' to stop 
until our fathers can be home sometimes and not be just 
like a horse — take out of the stall and put back in the 
stall." 

"You see, twelve hours — that's too long for a man to 
work. A man can't work so long and be anything but 
tired out like a beast. I used to be a miner when first I 
worked in this country — we worked thirteen hours. We 
struck. We don't win. We go to jail because we picket. 
We get sent to jail for all kinds of reasons. But now 
the miners, they only work eight hours. 

"You see those boys of mine; I got four. By and by 



The Break 149 

they goin' to grow up, maybe they goin' to go and work in 
the mills like me. I want my boy should get a chance to 
read more than me. I want those boys to have a chance to 
learn more than I have a chance. I want they shouldn't 
have to work fourteen hours night and ten hours light. I 
want when they're old enough to get married that they 
see their babies sometimes when they're little. We all feel 
like that, but when we see how so many Americans went 
back so soon as the mill is opened, we Slovaks feel like we 
was out skating and that we skate out far and the ice cracks 
and we look around and only us, everybody else goes 
ashore — but we got to win jurt the same, sometime!" 

"Of course we got to win," his wife said. "What you 
been through before we can go through again and we can't 
go through anything so bad as we've been through ! When 
my oldest girl was a baby and before my big boy you saw 
going to school was born, father was on strike in the mines. 
Those days they was worse to strikers than they are now. 

"You think they do everything to strikers now. They 
do even worse then, in those days ! So father got thirteen 
months for picketing. We had got all our furniture paid 
for except fourteen dollars. After they took father away 
I couldn't pay any more. They took away everything from 
my house. They took my bed from my baby. They took 
my cook stove. They didn't leave me nothing. 

"I sat down on the floor of my empty house with my 
baby in my arms and thought about my new baby that was 
going to come, and I thought, 'No matter, I'm a strong 
young woman' ; I thought, 'Never mind what they do to me, 



150 Men and Steel 

I'll take care of both my babies until father gets out!' 
I sat like that on the bare floor of my house and thought 
to comfort myself that father was right to strike like he 
did and that I was going to fight shoulder to shoulder right 
alongside of him. I know we got to win, because it's right 
we should win." 

Fighting Women 

Next day I went to the women's meeting in the base- 
ment of the Slovak church in Steelton. It was not far 
from the Ohio works, near the house where I had had 
breakfast. There were perhaps seventy women. Some 
carried babies. They came from the new houses. 

The woman who had given me breakfast was there; I 
recognized women I had seen before. I had gone with her 
to the houses of many women, while she told them of the 
meeting. How clean their houses were; how they rejoiced 
in their new-found comforts. How happy they were living 
in houses that had little yards where their children could 
play. 

They talked with me about the strike. They asked prac- 
tical questions; they gave practical answers to questions. 
What they hated was the twelve-hour day. They under- 
stood less about the right of collective bargaining, though 
some were clear-minded about it. They wanted their hus- 
bands to work as men in other industries worked. They 
wanted leisure for their husbands. They wanted their 
boys to work under better conditions. 

They assembled in the basement of the church — fine 



The Break 151 

looking women, young wives and old mothers, middle-aged 
mothers of families. Most of them wore on their heads 
the frilled mob caps which the women in steel towns wear 
to keep the slack from their hair. 

They did not sit quiet the way the men did at meetings ; 
they talked back to the organizer. He sweated under their 
questions. They wanted to know the exact status of the 
strike; they wanted to know their chances of winning. 
They wanted to know if they got out on the picket line 
if it would help. Then he talked to them earnestly in 
their own language, and they listened, swayed by his ora- 
tory, sunk in his account of the battle. He held them in 
his hand. You could see indignation mounting in their 
eyes, the old women nodding their heads in affirmation of 
what he said. He was telling them the age-old story of 
the people's fight. He was relating it with the strike. 

He eased himself into a lighter tone. He made a joke. 
Laughter greeted him. They rocked with good earthly 
laughter. They were not afraid of life, they were not 
afraid of a fight, nor of a homely joke. They could love 
and fight and laugh. It was comforting to look in their 
eyes. It was terrible to think that all their sacrifices and 
all their courage might be in vain. 



CHAPTER XVI 

WHITE TERROR 

Johnstown Mob 

AFTER the strike had lasted some weeks, people 
said openly in the towns that the strike could not 
be broken peacefully. Members of the Chamber 
of Commerce said it, leading citizens. They formed vigi- 
lance committees. The Steel Company officials helped 
them. 

James Maurer, President of the Pennsylvania State 
Federation of Labor was threatened by a mob of dubious 
origin. It was said that money was spent by Chambers 
of Commerce in their effort to terrorize him. Boys formed 
the mob and hoodlums. Maurer was dangerous. Maurer 
had said if he had the power he would stop every wheel 
in the state if the steel workers' rights and liberties were 
not returned to them, so terror whined at his heels. 

In many towns these terroristic groups, under the name 
of citizens' committees, were organizing to stampede the ' 
strikers, to drive out organizers. This was done in towns 
where the strike had been peaceful, where there had been 
no conflicts with the police. 

Johnstown was such a town. The first week in Novem- 

152 



White Terror 153 

ber Foster went there to speak. At that station they 
warned him it would be dangerous. He went on. Conboy 
and Foster were walking up the street; they were going 
up to the hall. A mob of men bore down on them; they 
were surrounded and separated. They took Foster to the 
train, a gun in his ribs. There was no police protection for 
Foster. The state constabulary were quiet. When mobs 
are made up of leading citizens, mobs are unmolested. 
They put Foster on the train. 

That night the mob surrounded the strikers' hall. They 
drove the organizers out of town. They pried open the 
mills. The scene was set for the mills to open. It was 
more spectacular than the Youngstown opening. It was 
advertised through the papers. Of the 18,000 men on 
strike only 800 went back. But the opening had been 
made. Smoke rolled up to the sky. In these mills where 
no smoke had been, the fire of the blast took their heart 
from the men. The sense of disaster deepened in all the 
towns. The small striking communities were steeped in 
doubt; the bosses went around to the women undermining 
their courage, threatening that if their men did not go back 
there would never be any work for them. In isolated 
places every power the company knew was brought to bear 
on the strikers to make them believe that they alone were 
hanging on, to make them believe the strike was over every- 
where else, and that people were only striking in this town. 



154 Men and Steel 

Youngstown Arrests 

Every day brought the news of fresh arrests. When 
an organizer was missing for a few hours foul play 
was feared. A sense of anxiety oppressed every one. 
Every one was restless. A sinister menace poisoned the 
steel towns. It came from the spies, from professional 
strike-breakers. It had in it the whining of the mob spirit. 
The steel companies had massed their forces against the 
strikers. 

Conboy and Karowsky were railroaded out of Johnstown. 
Geoletti stayed to brave the mob. They could not make 
him go. Liley, of Butler, was arrested. Meetings were no 
longer allowed in Youngstown. Youngstown looked hun- 
grily at Johnstown's vigilance committees. The men were 
not going back to work fast enough. Citizens' committees 
were formed in Youngstown too. Strike meetings were for- 
bidden. "Black-hand" letters poured into the organizer's 
office. McCadden was arrested on the charge of "criminal 
syndicalism." The charge was not pressed, for, as some 
one said, you could as soon get McCadden on a charge of 
syndicalism as you could get Samuel Gompers on a charge 
of reading the I. W. W. Preamble for morning prayers. 

I went over to Youngstown again. I had seen Youngs- 
town triumphant, the laughter of victory on the men's 
faces. I had seen them stiffen up on the brink of disaster. 
Now courage was oozing from the men, and as courage 
oozed from the men hope went from the organizers. There 
was a different atmosphere now. They began to believe 



White Terror 155 

that they were going to lose. They had suffered in vain. 
Suspense and doubt had their way with them. 

It was hard in those days to talk to the men and meet 
their questions. More and more the Slavs felt that they 
were deserted on a piece of ice that had broken off and 
that a dark widening piece of water separated them from 
the land. 

I went down to the picket line, this time in East Youngs- 
town. The car was packed with scabs, many of them 
negroes. The police were out. Another woman reporter 
was with me. The police eyed us with suspicion. Accord- 
ing to the law, we kept moving. We walked up and down 
slowly. There were fewer pickets. There were more men 
going to work. The strike was not over; but it was waning. 
The courage of some of the men was such that they might 
yet be out if the strike had not been called off. 

The police watched us narrowly. Formerly they had 
appeared neutral to the strikers; now they were hostile. 
Presently I saw the chief of police speak to the woman 
with me. She came over to me. What he had said was: 

"Stop interfering with these men going to work or I'll 
run you in mighty damn quick." 

It was enough to be a woman and stand on the picket line 
in those days to have to run the gauntlet of police intimida- 
tion. In East Youngstown feeling had run high; women 
had come out on the picket line, women had thrown pepper. 
I explained that we were not pickets, but reporters. 

"Like hell you are," said the chief. "I know reporters 
when I see them; I know who you are." 



156 Men and Steel 

The Scab 

One of the organizers offered us a ride back to the office. 
It was early. The office was full of men. Some men were 
leaning back in chairs against the wall; some men were in 
front of the bulletin board. Men came in and went out. 
Every one was torn between hope and fear. It had not 
been as bad as they expected. It was bad enough. We 
stood around aimlessly. I made talk with Olchen, the 
Slovak organizer. 

"How are the meetings?" 

"Good enough/' he answered. "The men come. You 
remember the first time you are here?" 

I remember the shock of their laughter. Olchen looked 
around; he stood there anxious. Suspicion was in the air. 
Each man searched every man's eye. Every man asked 
every other man mutely: 

"Are you going back? Are you going to hang on?" 

Olchen spoke again. "You remember how it was; how 
they laughed^ how they stamped in the hall, hardly there 
was room for them. Now they come quiet, now they come 
asking . . ." His voice trailed off. 

I looked around at their faces. Now they came like 
empty vessels, drained of their courage, asking mutely to 
be filled with that first heady wine. 

Out in the hall there was a noise. It was the noise of a 
man sobbing. Talk stopped in the office. It was deathly 
quiet. Men drifted to the door to look out. A big Polish 
steel worker was sobbing with his face against the wall. 



White Terror 157 

Nobody spoke; every one was quiet. His disaster had 
overtaken all of us. The organizer who had been talking 
with him turned to us. 

"He's been scabbing. He thought everybody 'd gone 
back. They told him everybody'd gone back. He found 
out it wasn't so ; he found he was sold out. He can't stand 
it, he's been scabbing." Two or three of the men gathered 
around him trying to comfort him. It was as though we 
heard the voice of the strike crying in that hall. We turned 
away. Talk was resumed again. A man said: 

"To win they've got to make a coward of a fellow." 
Another answered: "That's what the steel companies 
make when they make steel nowadays. They're making 
cowards and they're making traitors." 



Thanksgiving at Donora 

On Thanksgiving Day I went to Donora to have dinner 
with the strikers. The road that takes you there is called 
the scenic railway. It goes through a country as romantic 
as the Berkshire Hills. There are abrupt hills and swift 
streams, dense woods. This sweet country has here and 
there a blot. Little, black sordid towns. Towns made of 
shacks. Towns without self-respect. 

Donora is a long, thin, meager town. It is desolate and 
abandoned, an aggregation of mean streets and mean 
houses. 

Groups of men were standing about the corners idle. 



158 Men and Steel 

I asked the first man I met where the strike headquarters 
was. He directed me to the Lithuanian Hall. Both strike 
headquarters and the commissary were in this hall. The 
never-failing group of men were around the bulletin board 
reading the latest strike news. 

"Where's Hodge ?" I asked. 

"Two plainclothes men came and got him — we're afraid 
they are going to arrest him just to spoil our dinner." One 
of the men took me down the stairs. 

"I tell you I had a pretty hard time to keep the boys 
quiet after they took Hodge away/' he told me. The smell 
of turkey was in the air; long tables were set out. The 
men were eating their dinner or lining up for it — the dinner 
was five cents a plate to those who could afford it. The 
place was full of good fellowship. But there was some- 
thing else in the air — an uneasiness — as if everybody was 
waiting for something to happen — a lurking sense of dis- 
aster. 

I went up to the office of the Constabulary. State 
troopers were lolling around in chairs, out of uniform. 
The burgess was in his office. I talked with him. 

"You have had no trouble here?" I asked. "The strikers 
have been quiet?" 

"The strikers have been quiet enough/' he agreed. "Our 
people are all right; it's these agitators." He shot a 
poisonous glance at Hodge who had come down the stairs 
and stood in the hall talking with the Chief of Police. 

The burgess was a soft looking little man. He had a 
red face, a receding chin and watery eyes. 



White Terror 159 

"Outside agitators was what made the trouble." He was 
sure of that. The people were all right until they came. 
The men who walked out of the mills had always been 
happy and satisfied. They walked out just to make a liv- 
ing for these agitators. Organizers are professional 
trouble makers who make a living stirring up contented 
people. 

He talked on querulously in this fashion. It was his 
mental bankruptcy that offended me. The officials talked 
like this in all the steel towns. Organizers alone had made 
the trouble. The obvious answer is, "Lynch the organizers. 
If you can't lynch them, deport them, arrest them — and 
the ignorant foreigners will be good again." 

Things were stewing and boiling in Donora. The super- 
intendent of the mills spoke from his automobile urging 
the workers to come back. No one stopped him. Had a 
strike sympathizer spoken to the men, urging them to stay 
out, he would have been arrested, he would have been 
"inciting to riot." 

"Mind you, no speaking," the Chief of Police threw after 
Hodge as we walked away. 

"I get you," Hodge said good-temperedly. We returned 
to strike headquarters. When Hodge came the uneasiness 
lifted only a little. He told them that he had been sent 
for to promise that there would be no speeches after the 
Thanksgiving dinner. You felt that the men were appre- 
hensive and uneasy. There were citizens' committees in 
Donora. There was no telling when the mob spirit would 
unloose itself. The strikers knew it. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE DYING STRIKE 

The Funeral 

FOR a time the riding down of people appeared to 
have ended. There were no more wholesale arrests. 
But the Constabulary stayed in the towns and 
though they were comparatively quiet, we heard from them 
from time to time. One day in strike headquarters in 
the Monongahela House, word came that the Constabulary 
had broken up a funeral in Braddock. 

There had never been such a funeral. There was no end 
to it. First there were many carriages and afterwards an 
interminable procession of black clothed men under um- 
brellas. It was a cold day. Rain fell in a drizzle. It 
froze as it fell. No one knew the dead man's name. There 
seemed to be no reason for the breaking up of the funeral. 

During the afternoon men came dripping into the office. 
Huge silent men. They had not much to say. Yes, the 
mounted police broke up the funeral. The men had run. 
"They said there were too many of us," was their explana- 
tion. This funeral had become a procession, a demonstra- 
tion, and such things were not allowed in Braddock. 

The mourners did not seem surprised to have the funeral 

160 



The Dying Strike 161 

broken up. The "Cossacks/' as they knew them, were 
there to prevent, inhibit, invade other assemblages as harm- 
less as funerals. Life is violent here. Men were killed 
in Braddock in 191 6. Homestead and its memories of the 
great strike of 1892 are across the river. 

From the sparse trickle of talk I got the impression of a 
very large funeral — a funeral as long as Main Street. 
During the afternoon the funeral took form in my mind ; it 
became as something I myself had seen. A heavy picture, 
black on black, black with a massive background of smoke. 
Smoke uncoiling itself to the clouded sky, smoke of such 
density as to seem solid. This smoke was the background 
of a hurly burly of men in heavy shoes, slipping and sliding 
on icy pavements. 

I saw it as if I had been there, the piles of dirty snow, 
the oily smoke writhing upwards to the slate colored sky. 
The wind wrenching umbrellas from hands. Black and 
white streets shining with rain. 

There was no clew among all these taciturn mourners as 
to why they had come in such numbers. But they had 
come from Monessen and Donora and Duquesne as easily 
as from South Pittsburg. It seemed that every Slav and 
Pole and Roumanian came to the funeral. They came 
from Rankin stewing over the smoke of the mills, and from 
Charleroi. Men had come who did not belong to the dead 
man's church or his society. 

The room began to smell of wet leather, of black dye, of 
men. There was a clash of gutteral talk from a group in 
a corner. A big fellow shook his fist upward in a slow 



162 Men and Steel 

menacing gesture. There was something solemn in this 
shaken fist, the symbol of revolt. 

It was part of some story. A crash of laughter fol- 
lowed — disquieting laughter. Laughter more menacing 
than anger. 

The Federal Raids 

In the last dreary stretches of the strike came the raids 
of the Department of Justice. Workers suddenly disap- 
peared from their homes. Fathers of families disappeared. 
Some were steel workers and some were not. In the minds 
of the steel strikers the raids were part of the program 
of violence. 

The local government had been against them — the bur- 
gesses and sheriffs and police. 

The State had been against them. The State Govern- 
ment was the friend of the steel masters, not of the steel 
workers. 

Now they felt that the United States Government was 
against them too. It was the logical sequence in the work- 
ers' minds. 

The spies of the United States Steel Corporation passed 
on tips to the Department of Justice. The Department 
of Justice acted on accusations given by illiterate under- 
cover men. So in each town some workers were spirited 
away. No one heard of them. Their families knew noth- 
ing of their whereabouts. Some of them were deported. 
But after having been held for months in prison, others 
returned. No charges could be preferred against them. 



The Dying Strike 163 

Long after the strike was over I heard the workers talk- 
ing about these raids. In the unexplained disappearance of 
inoffensive neighbors there was an element of terror that 
had captured their imagination. A striker in East Youngs- 
town talked to me about it. 

"Is it free country when they take feller out of his house 
at night and take him away? On my street live feller. 
They come in middle of night; they smash his trunk with 
ax; they look for gun; he ain't got none; they throw his 
things around; they take him off with them. Where is he? 
No one can know. His wife she cry and cry. They got 
five children. My wife take her in something to eat. My 
wife try to comfort her, but she cry and cry, 'Where is my 
man? How I going to live?' 

"The priest say to me: 

" 'John, did police have warrant when they came to his 
house ?' 

"Don't need warrant to search Hunkie's house. Maybe 
another time they come and take me away. So now I go 
to steamship company. Pretty soon I get back home again. 

"When I come to this country first time I am going right 
off to be citizen, I think. Pretty soon this is my country, 
I think. Pretty soon I buy me house. You know what the 
first English is I learn? 'Damn Hunkie' — that's what I 
learn. That's what they call me. But when war come, 
Hunky good enough to fight. 

"You hear what feller say is difference between govern- 
ment in Austria and government here. He say, there Kaiser 
rule; here mill boss rule. That's true. We gotta do what 



164 Men and Steel 

mill boss say. If we join union boss call us 'damn Hunkie* 
and kick us out. Is that free country? So now I go home 
to my country, Bohemia. My country more free country 
than this." 

There are thousands of competent workmen in his state 
of mind. They do not believe in American democracy. 
Why should they? They have never seen any in the steel 
towns. 

These raids at the last end of the strike were the final 
proof to the foreigners that every element of government 
was against them. They did not understand it. Why had 
the government done this? The foreign workers do not 
distinguish sharply between Socialists and Communists. 
Most steel workers come from countries where the Socialist 
Party has a powerful representation in their parliament. 
In their minds the raids were another evidence that gov- 
ernment is used to oppress workers. 



National Committee Office 

Through a fine sifting rain that froze when it reached 
the pavement and the grime-covered piles of half-melted 
snow, I went over to Homestead with an organizer who 
carried bulletins. It was during the last days of the strike. 

The office was filled so full with men that you could not 
move. They seemed to be waiting for something; they had 
an anxious air. 

There were an organizer's desk, a bench, a chair or two, 



The Dying Strike 165 

but there were no chairs for the men to sit on. I asked 
why. 

"They'd raid us if we had chairs. They'd call it holding 
a meeting," the organizer answered. There was not even 
a bulletin board. The Constabulary would not let them 
chalk up their news. They had four walls; they had 
nothing else. 

The room was always filled with men, men milling 
around, men waiting for something; a restless atmosphere. 
I have seen crowds like this in steamship offices — people 
waiting for news of missing vessels. I have seen people 
like this in France before the time of the Communique, 
people waiting for news of battle. 

People fearing news of disaster but hoping for good 
news wait as these men waited. 

They milled around; they shifted from one place to 
another. A few drifted out. More crowded in. They did 
not talk much, but there was a low hum in the air, a vibra- 
tion that was disquieting. The room was filled with sus- 
pense. One giant of a man with a blonde mustache like a 
lambrequin talked earnestly with a fellow squat as a dwarf. 
The squat man's chest was like a cask, his hairy arms hung 
to his knees. He felt me looking at him. He made his 
way to me through the crowd. 

"Ma'am," he said, "pretty soon we gotta win, ain't we? 
Pretty soon we gonna get what we want." He spoke with 
intensity, but there was no conviction in his voice. He was 
pleading with me to reassure him. He was repeating ta 
me what all the men in the room were saying: 



166 Men and Steel 

"Now pretty soon we must win." They all said it with- 
out conviction. Shipwrecked men on a raft at sea must 
talk in this tone as they look around the empty horizon. 

I had no words to answer him. I had seen the book of 
the United States Steel Corporation. I had seen a strike 
broken on the Mesaba Range. 

Three times a week these bulletins went to the strikers. 
They were printed in seven languages. Not all the strikers 
got this bulletin. It was the one slender link which they 
had between them; it was the only thing which many had 
to make them know that their fellow workers in other 
towns stood by them. 

Every one's face was turned to the organizer. Every 
one's hand was outstretched for bulletins. Men went 
through the steaming crowd with bundles of them. The 
talk stopped. Men were reading. Talk began again. 
Comments rapped out sharply in half a dozen languages. 

Here in Homestead and Braddock the men stuck. In 
the towns where the mills had always operated the strikers 
stood firm. They looked failure in the face, but to the end 
they filled the organizer's office, in their desire for freedom. 
They packed the room tight with revolt. They were men 
ready to pay in terms of themselves for their beliefs. 
What they believe was not f ormulted into a dogma. It 
was not narrowed down to trade union bargaining. They 
were dumb, inarticulate, but they were vibrating in tune to 
the great urge that is lifting up the workers around the 
world. They could lose the strike, but they could never 
lose the consciousness of their combined strength. 



The Dying Strike 167 

The Dying Strike 

The strike was dying. It was bleeding to death like a 
living thing. Seep, seep, seep — courage oozed from the 
men. Seep, seep, seep — they sagged back to work. Each 
man gutted of his self-respect was a victory for the Steel 
Companies. Strikes are broken by breaking men's courage; 
strikes are broken by making men play traitor to what they 
believe. 

The men knew this. Sullen, ashamed, they trickled back. 
Want drove them, and fear, and the doubtful faces of their 
women. There had not been enough of anything except 
men — not enough money, not enough organizers, not 
enough interest on the part of the Internationals involved 
in the strike, not enough support from official labor. 

Yet when the National Committee met in Washington 
on December 12th, 109,000 men were still on strike. The 
strike had not been stamped out. It had not been 
smothered. But it had been overwhelmed by the great 
forces against it; it was killed by the indifference of Insti- 
tuted Labor. So it died, from a slow bleeding. The steel 
workers' sobbing in the dark hall outside the National 
Committee Office in Youngstown will always be to me the 
sound of the dying strike. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

STRIKE DERELICTS 

Scrapped 

THE strike was over. Many men got jobs. Few 
got back their old ones. As much as possible the 
strikers were degraded. The old men were often 
not taken back. 

I went with Father Kazinci to visit the homes of some 
of those who were in trouble. We were looking for a man 
called Shapiro. Where Shapiro lived we had to find out 
from the Albanian butcher, who was on the same street 
with the Albanian Coffee House. Among the welter of 
races in Braddock there is a colony of these mysterious 
people. We found Shapiro's house on Halkett Street, 
the street that skirts the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio, 
separated from the shining rails by an iron fence. Like 
most steel workers in this part of Braddock, Shapiro lived 
in two rooms. The trains screeched past him perpetually. 
He had stepped out and one of the children was sent to 
fetch him. 

"What will we do, Father ?" his wife asked. "They 
won't give him back his job." 

The room was like any ordinary steelworker's room — 

168 



Strike Derelicts 169 

a kitchen, a shelf on which was a crucifix and candles, a 
lounge, holy pictures, curtains in the window. A room 
that tried to spell home. 

"What breaks his heart," the woman went on, "is our 
Anna. She works in the glass works. She isn't strong. 
She's supporting us both. Her hands are cut. If they 
won't take him back, what can we do? She comes back 
so tired, Father. It breaks her father's heart." 

Shapiro himself came in. He limped. 

"Were you hurt in the mills?" Father Kazinci asked 
him. 

Shapiro bent over, rolled his pants up and his stocking 
down. Jagged across his leg was the white scar of an 
old wound. 

"After that," he said, "I was never strong again." 

"Did you get compensation?" 

"No, Father." 

"Did you try to?" 

He shook his head. "They said they would take care 
of me." 

"And now they won't take you back again after tke 
strike?" 

"No." 

"Were you active in the strike?" 

"No, Father." 

"Were you a union man?" 

"Not before the strike. When I first came to this 
country there was a strike in New York where I was 
working. I did not strike. The men beat me up. This 



170 Men and Steel 

time when a strike comes, I said to myself, 'Better I 
strike with the other men'." 

He looked at us with innocent puzzled eyes. One could 
see he had understood nothing. The industrial machine 
of America had caught him up. First he had broken some 
rule he did not understand and suffered for it. Now he 
had broken a rule on the other side and suffered for it too. 
"How many prears have you worked in this country?" 
"Over twenty years. They won't take me back/' he 
repeated. "They said, 'No work for you/ ' He looked 
at Father Kazinci as though he had asked him to unravel 
the problem of his life. Why had he been beaten in the 
first place; why had he been discharged in the second 
place; why was life so hard? Who could tell him? He 
had worked always, and now his little daughter must 
work with bleeding hands. 

The Riddle's Answer 

We walked down Halkett Street to another house. Here 
an old man was waiting for us. This old couple was liv- 
ing in one room. The bed had been moved down to the 
kitchen, as the upper room had been rented to a lodger. 
It was neat, but the room gave the impression of a place 
filled with grief. The man, gray faced and gray of hair, 
stood silent. The woman talked in her own tongue. 

"Do you remember the funeral?" Father Kazinci turned 
to me. "Do you remember the funeral they broke up? 
It was this man's son. He died of rage. Early in the 



Strike Derelicts 171 

strike he was beaten over the head by a trooper. One 
day the troopers were riding up and he flew at them; he 
attacked them with his bare hands. He tried to drag the 
Cossack from his horse. Suddenly he fell back. People 
around thought he had been shot, but he had had a stroke. 
They brought him here. He died in this bed." 

Now I understood the big funeral. I understood those 
silent, dripping men. They had come out to pay tribute 
to anger that had been greater than fear. This man had 
done what so many of them had itched to do; he had at- 
tacked the state troopers with his bare hands. He had 
expressed the hate that was in the hearts of all of them. 
He had risked his life to do it, and he had paid with 
his life. So when he died Monessen and Donora and Char- 
leroi and East Pittsburg had come out 

Now his father could not get work again. He was sixty- 
nine years old and had worked for thirty-five years in the 
Edgar Thompson Works. The son had left a widow 
with five children. 

The old man's daughter, who lived near at hand, had 
been left a widow also. She had a daughter who worked in 
the Westinghouse, and a boy who worked by day in the 
library and went to night school. There were four other 
children. Fifteen people were living from the labor of 
two young girls, and the money earned by young John 
who worked in the library. The gray woman put this 
question to Father Kazinci: 

"What shall we do if our father is not given work 
again ?" 



172 Men and Steel 

He had no answer for her question. The other children 
are too young to work. The mothers with little children 
cannot go to work. At most they can take in some wash- 
ing or pay their rent by taking lodgers. What is to be 
done if the grandfather is not taken back? During the 
strike they spent their savings. What is to be done? 
Ke is sixty-nine years old and he has worked for thirty- 
five years in one place. To the question : "Were you active 
in the strike ?" he had a negative. His son had been active. 

The problem was an unsolvable problem. We saw before 
our eyes two households disintegrated. We saw children 
deprived of the chance to live. Women with children driven 
to sending those children to institutions. What was to be 
done if there was no work ? 

Life-Long Protest 

We went into another house. A young woman sat wash- 
ing her feet. There is no privacy in the First Ward. 

Between the two windows was a photograph of the U. 
S. S. Sigourney. This was a son's ship. He had been a 
volunteer. He had been discharged from the navy five 
months. He didn't get his old job back when he returned 
to the steel mill; he was for some time out of work. Now 
he was working again. So was Steve's son-in-law. 

Old Steve alone had not been taken on again. The son- 
in-law, and Mike, the sailor, also strikers, had been given 
jobs. Not such good jobs, not their old jobs — but they 
were working. Old Steve had been scrapped. 



Strike Derelicts 173 

Twenty-three years ago he had fallen and broken his 
foot in the Edgar Thompson Works. He got no com- 
pensation he said. He was as sound looking a man as a 
winter apple, ruddy cheeked with innocent blue eyes. His 
wife resembled him as it is said that husbands and wives 
in their old age grow to resemble one another. His wife 
and he had the back tenement and his married daughter 
the front — good people, sound people. For twenty-five 
years he had gone back and forth to the Edgar Thompson 
Works. Almost in his first year he had had the accident. 

There were nine now in his family, including a daughter 
working for the Westinghouse Company. He was not a 
citizen. He could not read and write. He could rear 
sons to volunteer in our navy, and he and his wife could 
bring up their daughters to be fine women. 

Other men were worse off. There was no one dependent 
on him. He had sons to look after him, but a man in his 
late fifties cannot face inaction even though hunger does 
not stare him in the face. 

Sweeter old people I never saw, none who looked more 
innocent or more defenseless than Steve and his wife. I 
have never seen a house kept with such exquisite perfec- 
tion as this little old woman kept her two rooms. Its clean 
smell was like a perfume. The rugs on the floor were 
handwoven. As in every other house, here was a shelf 
covered with a deep-laced crocheted fringe on which stood 
the crucifix backed by tall candles. These are the usual 
possessions. But in this house order and spotlessness had 
a deeper significance. It was as if this woman had spent 



174 Men and Steel 

her life in a passionate protest against Braddock's dirt 
and Braddock's ugliness. She had been too busy keeping 
things clean, raising her children, to learn much English. 

Old Strikers 

Two old men who could not get their jobs called at the 
rectory. They were magnificent looking men. Both had 
shoulders as wide as doors. One was fifty-six. He had 
worked with the Edgar Thompson people for thirty-two 
years. The other was fifty-three. He had worked for 
thirty-four years with the same firm. One had six children 
and the other seven. Each one owned his own house. One 
had a six-room house on which he had already paid his 
whole life's savings. 

I asked one why he was not a citizen*. He answered: 
"Ma'am, I work for twenty years at night/' 
The only time he saw his children was at breakfast. 
He returned to sleep as their day began, and had worked 
Sundays for twenty years. Now after thirty-two years he 
also had been scrapped. He had the only other explana- 
tion that I heard beside that of age for failing to get his 
job back when the younger men were returned. A near 
neighbor of his was a spy in the pay of the company. 
People knew the man was a "spotter." When organiza- 
tion was going on in the works, he had been an informer. 
On a certain day this man got drunk. He flourished a 
pistol around and swore at the strikers and said he would 
shoot any — who didn't go back 



Strike Derelicts 175 

to work. The old striker went to the police station. He 
reported that there was a man behaving in a dangerous 
and unseemly fashion. The company's spotter was arrested 
and fined. 

That he believes is why he and his son are not rein- 
stated. He had caused the arrest of a drunken spotter. 

These men in their fifties look strong enough now to do 
any kind of a day's work. If the company kept them on, 
later they would not work so well. After a lifetime of 
work in this country, after raising children, contributing 
sons to the army of this country, there was no more 
work for him. 



CHAPTER XIX 



ALIENS 



Boy Without a Country 

AS Father Kazinci and I walked through the Brad- 
dock alleys we bent our heads to the thin rain 
without speaking. I had been accompanying him 
on a round of parochial visits, and we did not talk because 
there seemed nothing adequate to say. 

At last he spoke: "If you analyze what we have heard 
to-day, it means something like 'No advancement for the 
Slavs.' They cannot help giving them jobs, but they will 
give them as poor ones as they can. I wonder if John 
has his job." He looked toward a boy coming toward us. 

"He was my most brilliant pupil. When he had to leave 
school, I wept. He comes from a remarkable family. 
There are six boys. Each of them deserves a college educa- 
tion. I have to face no more bitter thing than to see my 
ambitious boys swallowed up by the mills. It's hard with 
all of them. But this hoy could not be kept down. When 
the strike came, he was on the road to advancement to 
become assistant chemist." 

We were face to face with him now. 

"How do you do, Father?" 

176 



Aliens 177 

"How are you, my boy? Did you get your old job 
back?" 

"No, Father." 

"Why not?" 

"I don't know, Father; they wouldn't give it to me." 

"Were you active in the strike?" 

"No, Father." 

"You didn't stay around strike headquarters a lot?" 

"No, Father; I was home." 

"When you went for your job, what did they say to 

you?" 

"They said, 'What's your name?' and when I told them 
they said: 'Nothing doing for you. We're not going to 
have nothing but Americans in the chemical department 
after this.' ' He had spoken in a quiet, lackluster voice, 
and now bitterness broke out of him. "What makes an 
American?" he demanded. "Wasn't I born here? Weren't 
all of us born here? Ain't the boys like my brother Joe 
who volunteered as good Americans, even if they have got 
'ski' or 'ko' to their names — as good Americans as the 
fellows called White or Smith? I'll say we are! They 
said so too while the war was on. You remember the 
poster 'Americans all!' Say, Father, the man who made 
that picture ought to work in Carnegie Steel. He'd learn 
the difference between an American and a 'damn Hunky' 
quick enough!" 

Again there was nothing to say. We had no answer for 
his bitterness. The thin rain fell on us. Tow-headed chil- 
dren made a cheerful slide down tlie alley. An old woman, 



178 Men and Steel 

her head tied in a kerchief after the fashion of Central 
Europe, toiled along, carrying a load of wood. A silence 
as frozen as the rain held us. The boy broke the silence. 

"What nationality do you suppose my little son is?" 
he asked. "He is only the third generation here. I 
guess he ain't got any country." 

We walked on down the bleak alley, with its swarming 
tow-headed children who had found a plaything in the 
brittle surface of the icy pavement. 

"That boy's mother is a wonderful woman/' said 
Father Kazinci. "She has eleven children, and each new 
one as it comes along she shows to me as a gift from 
God." We turned down a passageway which led down 
hill into a courtyard. The courtyard was lined around 
with smoke-blackened pens where the tenants kept hens 
and animals. The heaps of filth defacing the court were 
now covered with a thin purifying coating of ice. Five 
paces from the front door, on a slightly higher level, stood 
a privy common to several families. Near the door was 
a bench, on which sat a row of fowls, like everything else, 
shining with ice. Over the door projected three blackened 
boards — a shelter from the burning sun, when the swelter- 
ing court became a brick oven, but now cutting out what 
little light there was. The brick house had been painted 
light blue, which gave it a cheerful air. 

A smell of old grease, of drying clothes, rushed fiercely 
at us as we opened the basement door. A wide-bosomed 
strong woman who rocked a cradle greeted us. She was 
still comely, almost handsome. She broke into a torrent 



Aliens 179 

of greeting in her own tongue. Father Kazinci translated: 
"She says, 'Father, you see me here in my bare feet 
and my rags. I have been here twenty-two years, and I 
live as you see. This is all I have — these rags, this cel- 
lar, my eleven children. Every night I bless God, who has 
kept them in good health. For twenty-two years, Father, 
I have worked from morning till night, and often late 
at night, but after all this work we have nothing to give 
them but this." 

Striker's Christmas 

There were two small windows that did not open, and a 
slit of a window high in the rear of the room. The door 
opened flush on the soggy courtyard. In the room were 
a stove, a table, four chairs, benches, and the inevitable 
row of holy pictures. On the floor above the father and 
mother slept in one room with the five younger children. 
In the attic slept the four boys. Always there had been 
a new baby. Before they could escape from this cellar 
another baby always came. 

Peter and Lisa, the babies now in the room, had come 
the same year. John at thirteen had had to leave school 
because other children were being born to the Savkos. 

Lisa stood on the bench, her head silhouetted against 
the window. In her hand she held two flat pieces of gum; 
with these she made a cross against the window-pane, then 
a T, then an angle, then she put them carefully in her 
pinafore pocket. Then, tranquil, serious, absorbed, she 



180 Men and Steel 

looked at a book. She continued in her little world while 
her mother talked. 

Father Kazinci translated: "Would I live here if I could 
get out? Would I live here, would I remain where the 
dirty water of the privy overflows and crawls over the 
court under the doorsill until it makes a pool on my 
kitchen floor? Is that a view for children to look at 
year after year, year after year? To keep them clean 
I must wash out in the yard. Look, missus, this is my 
apron!" She brought a stiff oilcloth apron, still frozen. 
"I wash out in the cold, so I won't splash water over my 
children, so they can have a dry place to play. Eleven 
souls to keep clean here in Braddock means work." 

She illustrated with wide gestures: 

"On Christmas we were all here, Johnny and his wife 
and the baby. Father, you see this little room and this 
small table, these few chairs? Fifteen souls. Some ate. 
I cleared away. Others sat down. The little girls sat 
on the stairs. Two boys used the black stove for a table. 
The children laughed and were happy because there was 
goose and stuffing, but my heart was heavy. Must the 
children eat from the floor like pigs even on this day of 
our blessed Lord? It was no comfort to me that He was 
born in a manger. For this one day I would have short- 
ened my life if only we might all of us, young and old, 
have celebrated Christmas by eating together at one table. 
I thought how beautiful if we could all have sat down at 
once, each in his own chair, each with his own plate and 
knife and fork, on this one holiday. What happiness !" 



Aliens 181 

A Worker's Story 

The woman's arms had always been full of babies. You 
could have told that by the way she gathered up Lisa while 
she went on with her story. 

There was in the story one green spot of delight. Once 
she and her husband had $180 saved. They had gone to 
Holyoke and visited a sister. They would have stayed, but 
there was no work for the father to do. That had been 
eighteen years before, but the memory of the wide Con- 
necticut Valley and the sweet New England towns still 
gladdened her heart. 

The children began coming in from school. They 
dragged a little table out from underneath the big table 
and sat about it, playing. Happiness survived in this 
meager room. It was a home made abidingly good by 
that woman. Here people were kind to one another. The 
little girls played together quietly with the harmony of 
children accustomed only to love. 

The boys came in. The baby waked up. The mother 
took him in her arms. The window was a luminous square 
of dark blue. She sat there, silhouetted against it, enor- 
mous, her head erect in the defense of her own. As the 
dusk deepened the children came to her, crowding them- 
selves into her flanks. The three little girls stood on one 
side, Steve next, and then George. 

She was talking: "Ah, my dears, that was a terrible time 
— 7 es ; Y e $> that was the time! That was the time! De- 
spair stared at me. Despair was stronger than God's hand. 



182 Men and Steel 

Despair walked at night beside me. They laid him off 
— they laid off our father! We were on strike just now, 
but it was the company that was striking then! I had 
Annie in my arms, another coming, seven mouths to feed! 
What can I do? I sat one day for six hours in the 
boss's office. 'I will stay on my knees here/ I thought, 
'until he takes our father back. Even if it is a slack 
time, there is some work they must give him to do/ I 
thought. 

"It was at that time I used to buy rags from the rag- 
man — the rags the Americans had thrown away — iand 
wash them clean and patch them and make clothes for the 
babies. What else could I do? 

"Johnnie found himself work at night, so he could study 
at day. For a year until he was fourteen he held the red 
hot links of chains in a pincers from five o'clock at night 
until three in the morning, but the hot metal hurt his eyes. 
His eyes were always red, but he would not give up. You 
remember, Father, he did this for a year. He would 
fall asleep over his books, poor boy! 

"Oh, my dear, misfortune has followed me from the 
day I left my own land. One misfortune after another. 
Now it is Stevie who must set up pins in the bowling 
alley from six till half-past eleven at night." 

"I get five dollars," said Stevie. 

"How could I help it, Father?" the woman continued. 
"It is always the same, so many mouths to fill." She looked 
at us with her extraordinary intensity and cried out: 
"Would to God I had never come! Would to God I had 



Aliens 183 

never seen this land ! Would to God I had remained 
where, if we had no school, we might have had the blue 
sky and the fields ! What good does it do them — the few 
days of schooling? With them it is a thirst and a hunger 
for knowledge, and I must see them starve for the knowl- 
edge they cannot have. What is the meaning, Father? 
Why should things be so?" 

The door opened, and Johnnie came in. Upstairs the 
father and Andy, the third son, were sleeping — both on 
the night shift. They were all gathered under one roof 
now, this family of aliens who had lived among us for 
twenty-three years in so precarious a fashion. John spoke. 

"Father," he said, "I found out the name of the Amer- 
ican fellow who got my job." He spoke without irony. 
"It was O'Rourke." 

They Want to Go Home 

There are thousands of women who echo this cry: 
"Would to God I had never come!" There are thousands 
of men and women homesick for their own lands ; and they 
are going as fast as steamships will take them. The emi- 
gration officials, the officials of steamship companies, the 
priests, will all tell you so. 

The easy answer to this is: "Well, if they don't like it 
here, let them go." But the wheels of industry do not 
turn of themselves. They grind the raw products of this 
country into wealth because we have had plenty of for- 
eign workers to turn the wheels. We need the workers. 



184 Men and Steel 

Textile mill, mine, and steel mills recruit them in their 
ewa countries. 

Now the homesick people from Central Europe are go- 
ing back to their lands. They have been cut off from their 
families for years. They are taking with them strange 
memories and strange stories — memories of mounted con- 
stabulary chasing workers from streets, memories of raids 
and of arrests, memories of mothers and children crying 
about a vanished father. 

Many steel workers are going home to tell their friends 
that the government of America is against the workers. 
There are thousands upon thousands who learned to be- 
lieve last winter that this is a government for rich men. 

On their return home these emigrants will tell the stories 
of raids, imprisonments and deportations for political rea- 
sons. And they will tell them in every hamlet in Italy; 
they will be told in the Balkans and in Central Europe out 
to the Baltic Sea. These stories will lose nothing by the 
telling. Those who listen will believe that America is a 
land of despotism where an unbridled brutality is per- 
mitted to the police. 

As long as exchange is high there will be a backward 
flow of foreign workers. Instead of people coming as to a 
promised land, the immigrants will come in a suspicious 
and hostile frame of mind. Instead of settlers we will 
have gold seekers. 



Aliens 185 

They Will Wait 

Weeks after the strike was over I walked agaim down 
Braddock's alleys. The outward flow had set in. Many 
of my acquaintances had gone back to their own countries. 
The derelict old man, whose son had died of rage, had 
gone. The family was scattered. 

There were no outward changes. The women's cur- 
tains were still drying on frames. The children played in 
the litter. Smoke rolled down the valley. Gusts of white 
steam arose behind the mill walls. 

A woman was sitting beside her door with a child in 
her arms, another playing at her feet. Her mild eyes 
gazed on vacancy, as though not seeing the monotony of 
the squalid street that ended with the red cylinders of the 
mills, vast structures rearing their monstrous tank-like 
bulk far into the air and above which rolled the somber 
magnificence of the smoke. 

The woman had the patience of eternity in her broad 
quiet face. 

"I have waited," she seemed to say. "I am eternal. 
This strife is about me and mine. If my brothers do 
not change this, my sons will. I can wait/' 



THB HND 



